by 
jbitz34
ANSWERS: 4
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Because they're stupid. Seriously, they are... I'm taking french and everything has a gender, and I hate it...
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Well I am French and I think it is nice to give a gender to things. A car is female, a spider is female, a tree is male and a pair or trousers is male. It doesn't make much sense but that's the way it is. I think it gives a little charm to the language and it is so nice when a British person gets it wrong... honestly, it is very sexy to hear an English speaking person calls La Voiture, Le Voiture... very sweet indeed!!!
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It all relates to life. There has always been a male and female long before we developed language. This notion of male and female simply transitioned into objects as language developed. The notion of not having a gender simply didn't exist. This is only a theory but as an anthropologist I can tell you this is a highly regarded theory and not my own.
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I agree with eshroom. Most of the languages we are speaking of that have genders are Indo-European languages (ie languages that had their origin in the Caucasus mountains area around 6 000 years ago)This enormous language group spread into the North Indian area, Persia and Europe. So all these peoples who speak closely or distantly related languages are subconsciously voicing a world-view of a people from long ago. The ancestral tribes had a dualist religious view- there was sky/earth, good/bad, light/dark, gods/demons and, of course, male/female. Since the world was divided into two, then nouns also became divided into two , hence genders. Some daughter languages also developed a neuter category for diminuitive nouns and later absorbed vocabulary, the gender of which they were not sure of.
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