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Since English is a Germanic language, and the other Germanic languages have noun
gender, why doesn't English have any? Not only that, but it was influenced by the
Romantic languages too, which are full of noun gender. Any idea why it is completely
gone?
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Richard, the reason why English doesn't have grammatical gender is that it was along
with much of the inflection of it historically; one can see the same thing in the
case of Afrikaans, which lost both practically all the preexisting inflection in
Dutch and the grammatical gender system which existed in Dutch (that is, a three-gender
system, masculine, feminine, and neuter, where the masculine and feminine genders
are very often indistinguishable from each other). Because grammatical gender is
generally tied to agreement based on it, when the inflections that mark such agreement
are lost, grammatical gender is generally lost with them.
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