[alexfrydl]

Old English has the same gender system as German. The reason English doesn't have gendered nouns now isn't because we are so progressive, but because language tends to lose all its excess features as it gets spoken and a LOT of people speak English. Basically, people can't be bothered to do grammar properly so eventually it just goes away (see: “whom”).

Also, English is not the language of gender progressives. Many cultures had different conceptions of gender, including additional gender categories or even a total lack of concern for categorization. All of this was stamped out by English colonizers, who had extremely rigid ideas about gender (that they apparently still haven't gotten over in 2021 tbh).

[Tagbert]

English lost it’s gender and most of it’s verb declensions as a result of the Norse occupation. The Norse occupied around half of Britain for several hundreds of years. Both Norse and English had these linguistic forms, but the specifics did not match and were confusing to the adult Norse trying to learn English. They adopted a simplified version and that spread among the population.

The grammatical effect was stronger than the Norman influence because the Norse lived among the English unlike the Normans who were a ruling class.

The Norman influence was more in the vocabulary and spelling. Normans were the scribes, lawyers, etc. They introduced large numbers of Norman French words that trickled out into English. Their scribes used French spelling even when writing English words. That is part of why English spelling is so complex now.

[macdice]

I incorrectly assumed Norse and old English genders and cases ought to line up neatly and wouldn't have caused the whole system to be thrown out the window on contact. I stand corrected. Thanks!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_in_English#Decline_of_g...

[imbnwa]

The amount of common, everyday, practical vocabulary that descends from Old Norse that you use all the time on a daily basis is impressive.

[umanwizard]

> but because language tends to lose all its excess features as it gets spoken and a LOT of people speak English.

Citation needed - this sounds like pop linguistics without a scientific basis, to be honest.

English has plenty of “features”; what it lacks in morphology it makes up for in very complicated syntax. And it lost those morphological features well before the British colonial period, so it’s not really true that more people spoke it than, say, the Slavic languages which haven’t lost them.

[macdice]

Edited: I guessed wrong, see Tagbert's answer. It was Norse contact (erm, the ones in the north, not the Normans who were French-speaking ethnic Norse people in the south).

I thought it probably had more to do with the influence of Norman French. The Germanic gender and declension system couldn't survive the influx of French lexicon, as the two languages with completely incompatible grammar and genders coexisted and eventually merged into a new frankenlanguage.

There was a recent article I can't locate right now claiming that for some period of time, English scribes writing late middle English (?) used to add an extra 'e' (and maybe more endings) to various words following old grammatical rules that involve knowing the gender and case, but began to forget the rules and eventually it decayed into randomly adding 'e' to sound smart, which is the basis of modern joke forms like 'ye olde shoppe'.

As an English speaker it's interesting to compare with some of our closest cousins that have also lost a grammatical gender or two:

I don't know too much about Dutch, but as far as I can tell they went from the 3-gender German system to the 2-gender common/neuter system (like Scandinavia, yellow in the diagram) in the last few hundreds years, but their language is still full of frozen phases from the 3-gender system. I wonder, can a modern Dutch speaker actually create new phases using the words 'ten', 'ter' (= German zum, zur, "to the"), 'des', 'der' and maybe more? You'd have to know if a common gender noun was masculine or feminine, but I guess, unless you also know German, you won't be able to do it.

I believe the Afrikaans language of South Africa, a dialect of Dutch, is down to just one gender. IIUC they had to give up using Dutch school books some time in the past century, because (vast over simplification, I'm sure) they couldn't remember if nouns were common or neuter. I wonder if they also have frozen phrases that reflect the 2-gender, and perhaps even 3-gender grammar of the ancestral language.

The Scandinavians have a few pockets of dialects that still use 3 genders. I'm not sure how they maintain that, given that, as far as I know, the prestige forms and most literature are down to 2!

AFAIK the last people to speak a cousin language with more than one gender in the British Isles were the Norn speakers, who maintained a 3-gendered Norse dialect up until the mid 19th century.

[animal_spirits]

I'm saying I think it might be the other way around. I'm thinking that maybe _because_ English lost it's gender system (due to the reasons you listed above) is why we see this "gender progressiveness" in our society. But I can only speak for the USA. I don't know if this same kind of gender progressiveness exists in other societies