Has there been any account given for what causes grammatical gender classifications to be used in languages? Is there a purpose in associating a gender to a word? Does this type of classification system help with comprehension or specificity?
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2Off the top of my head such systems are a big win for clarity. It reduces the amount of potential ambiguity in resolving the objects of agreement and antecedents of pronouns. In development of my own constructed languages I was quite tempted to use large numbers of noun classes (general form of "gender") for that reason, though in some cases I decided against it due to the added complexity. – Justin Olbrantz Dec 24 '13 at 22:01
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2"Gender" has nothing to do with sex; it's just one way of grouping nouns so they can be marked the same. That way you can use a root several times, which is economical. Another purpose is to allow noun phrases to be color-coded so they don't have to stick together and can be distributed through the sentence. There are lots of uses. Perhaps before you go much further with the question, you take a look at the Grammatical Gender and Noun Class articles on Wikipedia. – jlawler Dec 24 '13 at 23:38