I know a lot of languages have some aspects that probably seem a bit strange to non-native speakers…in the case of gendered words is there a point other than “just the way its always been” that explains it a bit better?
I don’t have gendered words in my native language, and from the outside looking in I’m not sure what gendered words actually provide in terms of context? Is there more to it that I’m not quite following?
What we call “grammatical gender” in Indo-European languages is a worn-down version of a noun class system. English’s is extremely worn-down; we only use gender on pronouns, whereas many other European languages use it on articles and adjectives with all nouns.
Some other language families have much more complicated sets of noun classes. Dyirbal has four (roughly: masculine, feminine, edible, and other). There’s a language in Georgia with eight, including two dedicated to body parts. Swahili has eighteen (and both adjectives and verbs are inflected to agree with nouns).
Meanwhile the Uralic languages (including Finnish and Hungarian) don’t have noun classes, not even gendered pronouns.
In languages with noun classes, it’s common for the words for “man” and “woman” to belong to different noun classes. And when we say “this word has feminine gender” all we’re really saying is “this word is in the same noun class as ‘woman’.”
It’s also worth noting that even those gendered pronouns in English work differently. Since they don’t have a grammatical gender system to rely on, they “hot-wire” to things outside language, such as social gender and sex.