[dreyfiz]

A few great comments from /r/linguistics on Reddit really enlightened me on this topic.

Gender isn't senseless, it's a checksum strategy for information. It's not even about sex, lots of grammars have genders that have nothing to do with male/female. The point of gender is agreement: if you're talking about something female, all verbs, adjectives, and adverbs in the sentence have to agree, or the listener gets a syntax error. The syntax error helps the listener figure out that they missed something, or that the transmission was garbled. https://www.reddit.com/r/linguistics/comments/3i1695/eli5_wh...

If you get rid of gender, as English mostly has, you end up forced to adopt different constraints that seem equally arbitrary and wasteful, like strict word order and lots of prepositions. https://www.reddit.com/r/linguistics/comments/3i1695/eli5_wh...

Very excellent comment demonstrating the point about English and word order - in Russian, you can say three words that mean "the dog saw the rabbit" in every possible order, and it's still a valid sentence that means the same thing, because Russian doesn't depend on word order. If it was English, "the dog saw the rabbit", "saw the rabbit the dog", "saw the dog the rabbit", "the rabbit the dog saw", and "the dog the rabbit saw" would all mean exactly the same thing, unambiguously, because the gender of "dog" would have to match the gender of "saw". https://www.reddit.com/r/linguistics/comments/1kdxsc/are_the...

[throwaway1967]

I'm sorry, but that still does not explain why the Romans created more gendered 3rd declension variants when using the neuters from the 2nd and 3rd declensions would have made more sense (since the things they were naming were sexless, like rivers and trees and other geographical things) while they would nevertheless have retained the "checksum" and "free word ordering" benefits from a language that declines its nouns.

For example, Finnish is utterly genderless, but it has more declension cases for nouns than Latin had. And so, Finnish affords itself the ability to have free word order and checksum benefits while doing entirely away with the concept of gender.

So I reject your explanation on the basis that it is clear to me that the declension of nouns into cases is what is responsible for the checksum and word order benefits, and not whether a language has grammatical gender.

[javert]

> For example, Finnish is utterly genderless, but it has more declension cases for nouns than Latin had.

That's consistent with simply making a tradeoff. So a Roman could say:

I don't understand why the Finns created more declension cases when they could have just used gender.

[dllthomas]

The free word order seems to come predominately from declension rather than gender, but I don't see how declension provides much in the way of a checksum.