English has no grammatical genders. For the handful of nouns have a gender (buck; doe, etc.), the gender pertains to the noun's meaning, not to its usage in a sentence.

Contrast languages such as French, where every noun is either masculine or feminine for grammatical purpose. To learn French you must learn, for each noun, whether it takes the masculine form of adjective (un, le, etc.) or the feminine form (une, la, etc.). I gather this is the case of all Romance languages; Hebrew is similar.

How did this develop? Did nouns have gender in earlier English (or its predecessor tongues), and then lose it? How does the distinction between gender/non-gender fit across language families?

How did this develop? Did nouns have gender in earlier English (or its predecessor tongues), and then lose it? How does the distinction between gender/non-gender fit across language families?

Old English (and indeed most of the Germanic languages and their common ancestor the hypothetical Proto-Indo-European) had grammatical gender. Old English had three genders like most other historical IE languages: masculine, feminine, and neuter (from the Latin for 'neither of the other two'). It is currently disputed whether the proto-language had three (masculine, feminine, and neuter) or two genders (animate and inanimate). Hittite our oldest recorded IE language on has two. Sanskrit, the next oldest recorded has three.

Most of OE's endings that marked grammatical categories like gender, number, case, etc., disappeared during the 200 year (or so) period during which we have few examples of English writing. By Chaucer's time, grammatical gender had pretty much disappeared, except for the personal pronouns. There are two ways this could've happened: (1) as endings disappeared due to phonological change, other ways of marking for grammatical categories were developed (e.g., word order); (2) other ways of marking grammatical categories developed first (the process of grammaticalization), which fostered great phonological change. Chicken or the egg.

More information on grammatical gender.

Grammatical genders are not always associated with biological sex, e.g., some Bantu languages have more than ten genders.

If PIE had two genders, here's one theory how those two became three. The two genders were animate and inanimate. The animate gender was for nouns capable of action (or being the subject of an active verb). Another gender developed from the the plurals of some inanimate nouns, that became singular, abstract nouns. These later became A-stem feminine nouns. Once the feminine gender developed nouns in the animate gender class split between fem and masc. Most of the inanimate nouns became neuter. (This may have taken place as PIE shifted from being an ergative-absolutive language to a nominative-accusative one.

Doesn't it seem odd that there would be ten genders when, in fact, the word "gender" means the female or male sex? Yet, when I look it up in dictionary.com, the "grammar" definition is actually first...which again I find very strange.

Regardless of how or why it happened, it's surely a wonderful change. Contrast German with three genders and with the various articles having to agree with the genders. Der Wagen (the car, masculine), Das Auto (the car, neuter), Die Autobahn (the motorway, feminine).

Our simple grammar is one reason why, I am sure, English has become such a powerful language (in spite of its eccentric spellings).

There can be no conceivable reason for the German grammatical complexity which adds nothing at all to the understanding of the language. What do we lose in English by calling everything "the"? (By the way, just think how the meaning of this last sentence would change were I to have adopted the US eccentricity of putting all punctuation marks inside the quotes.)

quote:

Doesn't it seem odd that there would be ten genders when, in fact, the word "gender" means the female or male sex?

Not in the slightest, because it doesn't mean that!

Gender is a grammatical term, and has no real connection with sex. It was only much later that it became used as a synonym for sex.

quote:

Gender is a grammatical term, and has no real connection with sex. It was only much later that it became used as a synonym for sex.

I had no idea this was the case. Can you give me more information on the history of this word?

the word "gender" means the female or male sex

Actually gender comes ultimately from Latin genus (generis) and means 'kind'. It was only later used as a sort of euphemism for sex.

There does appear to be a Latin root here that my dictionary defines as 'A class or kind of things which includes subordinate kinds (called species) as having certain attributes in common.' The earliest meaning of 'gender' that I can find is 1450 when it meant 'to engender (a feeling, etc.)'. Other definitions have been 'To copulate' (1634), 'To generate (heat, etc.) (1653) and 'Kind, sort' (1784). Oddly enough, the word 'genderless' didn't arrive until 1887.