What is the point of grammatical gender?

Yeah, I'd forgot that that was not a subordinate clause when I was writing it, for whatever reason, and I probably should have used "Flexion" rather than "Biegung" (which was what I intended). I wasn't sure about using "mir" versus "für mich" or "zu mir" myself.

Thank you, Ved, and Travis, for continuing to be voices of reason on this forum. Ved and Travis are right--you don't learn things such as grammatical gender in school, just like English speakers don't learn grammatical infections or irregular verbs at school...it all comes naturally from being surrounded by the language growing up. Adam, I think you may be confusing natural spoken language too much with the written language--remember that even in nonliterate societies they have no problems learning the rules of their grammar and speak their language perfectly well even if they've never spent a day of their life in school. The only trouble that grammatical gender possibly poses is to second-language learners.

Armenian also doesn't have a grammatical gender. Even the word for he/she/it is the same.

Japanese is another one, even though it does have what some would consider gendered pronouns (but they're not really pronouns, actually, as you treat them like any other noun overall).

Adam wrote : "Don't the native speakers of English feel proud that their language has no grammatical gender ?"
I'm positive they do. Perhaps just as much as French feel proud that their language has no <ing>-suffixed progressive form ?

Then later : "For example, in French there is - une arbre - a tree (feminine) - un chemain - a lorry (masculine)"
I'm sorry I have to infirm the examples above. <Une arbre> is not French : <un arbre> (masc) is.
<Un chemain> too is not French. <Un chemin> is French. But it doesn't mean <a lorry>. My suggestion : <a path>.

And finally : "It must have been very annoying for French children to learn the gender of each noun at school".
It is all the easier as French children (and I believe as all children on earth) acquire fundamental word stock (including gender) while they're still illeterate. In short, they speak before they write. French kids have more trouble with orthography than noun-gender.

But WHY do some languages have gender?

Why do you have to refer to "UNE porte" (a door) or "UN chat" (a cat)?

As an English-speaker, it seems stupid for a language to have gender. There's no need for it. Why, in French, should "chat" be "masculine"?

Also, it's the same the other way around. I've heard speakers of other languages saying that English is strange because it doesn't have noun gender.

But, to me, noun gender is pointless.

<<Why, in French, should "chat" be "masculine"?>>

A male cat is called "un chat", a female cat is called "une chatte".
Now this distinction makes sense, doesn't it?

<<to me, noun gender is pointless.>>

Languages are nothing more than sets of conventions. Don't like them? Don't learn the language.

Adam,

The reason why most of the languages have gender is beyond my knowledge. Perhaps the explanation can be found in human brain. Biolinguistics could help.

The reason why a language as English dropped gender - in surface - may be attributable to the huge trauma it has been enduring : direct Latinisation, slight Scandinavisation and violent Francisation (through French and Latin). All that led to inflexion and gender loss (incompatibility).

That <un chat> is masculine rather than feminine is now arbitrary, even though it may have not as the 'inventers' of French 'decided' a cat (in general) was masculine.

Q1: Why Ge <das Mädchen> ('young girl') is neutral rather than feminine ?
A1 : Because all <chen>-suffixed nouns are neutral by definition.

Q2 : So, the fact that Ge <das Mädchen> is neutral is not arbitrary ?
A2 : No, according to the <chen>-suffix rule, it is not. But the rule itself may be regarded as arbitrary.

Adam, you wrote : "As an English-speaker, it seems stupid for a language to have gender. There's no need for it".
Q : aren't masc <chairman>, fem <chairwoman> and neut <chairperson> English words ?

Greg, but you must remember that <chairman>, <chairwoman>, and <chairperson> are marked for natural gender, not /grammatical gender/; English does have natural gender, to an extent, but has an absolute lack of grammatical gender (mind you that things like ships being marked with "she" and countries with "she" is more a matter of natural genders being customarily assigned to things than grammatical gender per se). What we must remember is that the /kind/ of gender we're generally speaking about here is grammatical gender, not natural gender.

On another note, one must stop thinking of grammatical gender as being an analogue of natural gender, but rather one should view it as just a type of noun class system involving a relatively small number of noun classes which just happen to be to some extent linked with natural gender, in places. If one views grammatical gender in such terms, then the apparent arbitrariness of it all will be far less bothersome overall.

Yes, the chairpeople words have gender because they are of people. But objects have no gender by definition. That was his point.

Travis,

"Things like ships being marked with "she" and countries with "she" is more a matter of natural genders being customarily assigned to things than grammatical gender per se".
Don't you think grammar may be viewed as a kind of over-successful custom ?

"One must stop thinking of grammatical gender as being an analogue of natural gender".
I agree. Most French gender-marked nouns originate from an 'isomorphic' Latin noun-class (except historical distortions and loanwords). The most remarkable gender-marked words aren't nouns : adjectives, articles etc may be either masculine, feminine or neutral.

Well, as for countries and ships, the reason why I don't consider that to be really grammatical gender is because it doesn't come along with any of the other stuff that normally comes along with grammatical gender systems such as agreement with adjectives, determiners, and sometimes verbs, and whatnot, but rather is just a matter of rather loose traditional usages of certain personal pronouns for certain things, which is not even really fixed at all at a grammatical level (at least these days, I don't think that most people actually use "she" for such things much, at least here).

The one sentence in German I keep in my memory to illustrate this whole gender/case thing is:

Ein armer alter Mann sah einmal eine schone Dame und einen kleinen Jungen.

To a native German it comes naturally to have the correct endings corresponding with the relative nouns. It's just tough for learners who have to learn from scratch to recognise the correct gender. It's easy in the sentence I quite though because the gender of the nouns are obvious, but case endings come into the equation as well. It's very difficult for learners, especially English language natives who do not have to cope with such a grammatical nightmare.

For what reason, for instance, does the noun Buch have a neuter gender..DAS Buch?

I see it has more or less been explained, having read back through posts I missed.