history - Why don't English nouns have grammatical gender?


English nouns — other than those with natural gender, e.g. people or animals — do not generally have grammatical gender, and so are referred to as 'it' rather than 'he' or 'she'.


However, modern English has its roots in Norman French and Anglo-Saxon (Old English), both of which used grammatical gender for their nouns. In addition, other modern languages related to these continue to use grammatical gender today.


So, how come English doesn't?



Answer



Wikipedia (citing A history of the English language by Richard M. Hogg and David Denison) suggests that the loss of gender in English was "due to a general decay of inflectional endings and declensional classes by the end of the 14th century" as evidenced by increasing use of the gender-neutral identifier þe (the or thee).


"Why" is, of course, a difficult question to answer here. It seems that whatever pressures had influence over the evolution of the English language, the net result was a loss of accents, inflections and declensions. The above sources indicate that grammatical gender is like another form of inflection or declension, so it gradually disappeared from the language at the same time.


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