[masklinn]

> This I wonder about: do feminine and masculine (and nueter) pronouns indicate gender when used for non-people beings, or must they match the word of those things?

In french at least, words themselves have gender irrespective of the subject's gender. And pronouns usually match the word's gender. So a tortoise is feminine even if it's a male, so's a sparrow, a mole, a goat or a stork. Then, there may be subsets of the original word for each of the genders (or further differentiations by age). "Goat" in general is feminine but buck ("bouc") is masculine for instance.