Swahili Has 11** Genders** 

Kiswahili speaker from Kenya here. This was really insightful. An interesting thing I'd like to add is that in regular speech, a lot of Kenyans straight up ignore proper case use. For example, someone might say "Kiatu yangu"(My shoe) instead of the grammatically accurate "Kiatu changu" since "Kiatu" is in the "Ki-Vi" class.Proper case use is mostly required in formal situations. Btw way the words used to show case are called "ngeli". I'd also be interested to see a video on Kiswahili verb conjugation and how a single verb can contain so much information. eg "He will run" translates to "atakimbia" . Your Kiswahili pronounciation is good by the way. Just try to avoid dipthongs and elongated vowels.

Swahili has 15 genders, and every time someone complains we add 5 more.

As I live in Rwanda and speak Kinyarwanda, I can say that although there are around 16 Genders, they way they are structurally integrated into words makes them often easier to memorize. You can never say Umuntu (man) without the "umu" and if you learn a word, you don't just forget half of it usually. Also its really crazy how close bantu languages are with these classes, my Kinyarwanda knowledge basically just confirms everything in this video, even though I never learned Kiswahili.

Honestly genuinely quite shocked that he pronounced Xhosa with a "k" at 2:38. As soon as he showed the map of the wider Bantu family I thought to myself "aaah, he's gonna flex on us with his perfect pronunciation of the aspirated lateral click". Threw me that he didn't!

As a sympathetic language learner, I legit laughed out loud when you started going over the complex relationships between some of the noun classes. All of a sudden, Spanish’s 2 genders or German’s 3 - or Spanish’s 4 noun classes or German’s 4 - don’t seem all that tough

Polish has 5 noun classes based on this video Singular; 1: Masculine 2: Neuter 3: Feminine Plural; 4: Virile (Masculine) 5: Non-Virile (Feminine & Neuter Combined)

it does frustrate me endlessly that we call them genders for non IE languages. just call them noun classes, so much more informative

I'm a native Bantu speaker (I speak Gikuyu and Swahili) ,but even I learnt some things from this vid that I just kinda knew intuitively. The external perspective brings a new meaning to what I know. I'm team 'noun classes' for this concept, since for the layman, the phrase 'gender' denotes a property of animals and humans. In Bantu languages, all animals belong to the same noun class, regardless of their gender. The phrase 'He went to Nairobi' would translate to 'Alienda Nairobi' in Swahili losing all information on the subject's gender. If the same phrase was translated to another gender-ed European language, the information would be retained. I would call Bantu languages genderless for this reason. And English would be a gendered language without noun classes. I'm not a linguist though, so there might be something I'm missing about what 'gender' means in this context.

Grammatical gender with only two gendered languages has always driven me up the wall, but as a Swahili speaker I love all the noun classes. It’s because grammatical gender doesn’t communicate anything useful, imo, while each noun class in Swahili commmunicates something. a female table? That’s nothing. Whereas in Swahili, each class has its general meaning. Ki-vi? That’s books, spoons, languages, stuff used around the house. M-wa? Easy, that’s for people (and animals to a lesser extent). Animate living things. M-mi is landscapes. Shops, trees, bridges, rivers. By looking at the prefix you can get a sense of what the object is a large portion of the time. A male orange means nothing.

- What is your gender? - I'm a mechanic.

Swahili speaking transphobe: “THERE ARE ONLY 11 GENDERS! NO MORE”

The moment I knew why Simba in The Lion King was named like that. 😲😲😲😲😲😲😲😲

Love this video! I am a South African and have always loved languages. I speak about 4/5 languages at a conversational level (among them English and Afrikaans which have no grammatical gender) and learnt IsiZulu and IsiXhosa (each with 15 noun classes) at School. I found it incredible how logically and beautifully the languages flow because of all the noun agreement and found it quite funny/ignorant when people complained about the “impossible task” of learning a language like French with only 2 genders. Don’t really know where I was going with this comment but hey … Bantu languages are cool.

Polish linguists consider Polish to have 5 noun classes: masculine-personal, masculine-animate, masculine-inanimate, feminine, neuter. I saw *this* X and *these* Xs. - masculine-personal: Widziałem *tego* chłopca i *tych* chłopców (boy) - masculine-animate: Widziałem *tego* psa i *te* psy (dog) - masculine-inanimate: Widziałem *ten* nóż i *te* noże (knife) - feminine: Widziałem *tę* dziewczynkę i *te* dziewczynki (girl) - neuter: Widziałem *to* dziecko i *te* dzieci (child) It gets confusing considering that Polish has 7 cases and in some cases the difference between masculine noun classes might not be immediately visible.

My favorite part of Kiswahili is all the arabic loan words. The Swahili traders were very prolific and often did business with lots of Arabic speakers, so they took the language back with them. As a Hebrew learner, I can find the semitic influence in Safari and Kitabu. It makes me feel like that meme of that guy pointing at the screen

time to learn about my parents' language despite never speaking it to them and only nodding in agreement when my mom accidentally speaks it to me instead of the two other langauges i speak!

We call the noun classes, Ngeli in Swahili

Polish language is interesting in this regard. It has 3 genders (masculine, feminine and neuter) like many Indo-European languages. However, masculine nouns (and also masculine adjectives and pronouns) have animacy distinction. Inanimate nouns have accusative forms identical to nominative while animate nouns have accusative forms identical to genitive (however animate nouns behave like inanimate in plural). There are also personal animate nouns which have their own distinct ending for nominative plural and have accusative forms identical to genitive also in plural.

You made me really excited with that locative stuff!

I’m so glad to see you came back and made another video expanding on Swahili more. It’s such an interesting language! I personally lean toward the term noun classes.

I like your videos but always wish they were longer! For example it would have been nice to see a couple of examples of what type of words fit into each class here

I’m learning Swahili right now. I’m a bit confused. When you refer to ‘gender’ do you just mean ‘noun classes’? For sure the grammatical concept of noun classes is BY FAR the hardest part of the language for me, as a non-native learner. I was blown away when I realized how many noun classes there were and how I had to determine which class a noun was in and then I had to match the verb, adjective, etc with every sentence to the noun every time I wanted to utter a sentence. Learning Swahili will be a 10-year project for me (probably longer), but I’m determined to get to a C-level before I die.

Oh, I'll remind that in Latin, usually having pretty consistent gender, "nauta" (sailor) is male (nauta bonus) and all trees are feminine in Latin because of what I've been told is a cultural thing (arbor bona, although "-or" is usually a male ending like in senator)

Oh, and short forms of names in Russian often end in an -a, but male names stay male, although they are declined like a typically female noun

here in malaysia you call girls and boys in singular "dia" just dia but for plural it's "dia orang" and when you were talking to them it will be "kamu" if you want to say "me and my friend" it's "kami" or "kita" i don't know what is the difference about kami or kita

I mean, genus in Latin meant "type", so grammatical gender FROM THE START meant "noun class" without any implication of the modern/renaissance/medieval sense of "gender" as "sexual categorisation", let alone the contemporary sense of "cultural traits associated to sexual categorisation, but also overall identity". Latin grammarians didn't call it grammatical sex because it didn't match real world sexual dimorphism well (not even if we allow for metaphoric use for sexless objects and concepts)

having to learn these in school as a non-native Swahili speaker was so hard, and the teachers didn't help by caning you everytime you got them wrong, just made it even harder

Just discovered your channel. WOWWWWW!!!!!! Thanks for all this massive information - and so well put. Merci. Asante. Dziekuje. Grazie.

Ninajifunza kiswahili sasa (I'm learning swahili right now), and I can confirm the the noun cases are very hard to get ahold of, especially since some noun classes are the same, like how the m- prefix denotes a singular plant OR a singular animate noun. The syntax being similar to english does help, but still.

Of course, we all know they really skipped class 13 because it was bad luck

So cool! Thank you for sharig

You both confused me and convinced me that Swahili is cool as f. I’m adding it to the long list of languages I would like to learn someday. Right up there with Japanese and Icelandic.

I remember seeing some polandball meme about how Finnish apparently has an insane number of noun cases, something I've wanted to learn more about that I don't fully understand. Almost started trying to learn Finnish because of that, too.

nice! i just startetd learning Swahili a months ago, i noticed these inconsistencies aswell.

Checkmate, gender studies skeptics XD

I‘m just going to like this in advance, your videos are always great

Also intresting to add that (at least in Tanzania) there are also 2 colloquial but not formal (which is why you cant normally find them taught or in grammars) noun classes/1 gender, the singular is ka- which is used much more often than the technically correct ki- in a diminutive sense, it can also be animate or inanimate, for example "umeona kale kagari pale" have you seen that tiny car over there, "umekaona kale katoto" have you seen that little child, common agreement words are ka (-a) kangu (-angu) kadogo (-dogo) kazuri (-zuri) also used to express the small quantity of an uncountable object, kamaji (from maji) means a tiny bit of water. In the plural we usually use vi- which is the plural of ki- but the actually plural of ka- is tu-, for example "umeona (-tu- not used so as not to confuse with the agreement for us) tule tutoto pale" have you seen those little kids over there, or "hutu tutembele ni twa kwangu" these matembele are mine, "umeona tusaa twangu" have you seen my little watches

Okay, so I'm a Kenyan Swahili speaker. Now, usually in schools here in Kenya we're taught these classes according to their verb concords and not the nouns themselves. Like the first and second class "M/WA", would be considered "A/WA". This is the noun class of living things, to be precise, animals. So it wouldn't be "Simba ile ilikula nyama" ( The lion ate meat), it would be "Simba yule alikula nyama" and also the plural would be "Simba wale walikula nyama" in standard Swahili. This totally simplifies a lot of work. Here are the rest of the classes; Class 3&4 > "U-I" ; Refer to various types of trees and typically most words that start with 'M' but are not animals Class 5&6 > "LI-YA" ; Refer to big things and various types of fruit( Most of these words don't start with "ji" and are just their own morphemes e.g lengo(objective)-malengo(objectives) or neno(word)-maneno(words)). The ones that do start with the prefix "ji" are usually nouns in their big forms. Usually this is done by just adding the "ji" prefix but nouns that start with nasals are either replaced by it or the nasal is just dropped completely with no addition of a prefix. This is seen in words like "Mji" (town) and the big forms would be "Jiji" (City) as seen in the video. Class 7&8 > "KI-VI" or "CH-VY" ; Refer to tools, abstract concepts and small things(which class 13 was comprised of). These nouns (small things) are made by taking the big forms of the noun then just attaching the prefix "ki". Class 9&10 > "I-ZI" ; Refer to nouns that don't take any plural at all. Most of these words start with "n". This also includes languages, which usually start with "Ki" but don't take the plural form "Vi". It also includes loanwords from languages like English. Class 11&12 > "U-ZI" ; In my knowledge, typically nouns that start with "u" but are not abstract nouns as they have a class of their own. Usually if the noun has 3 or less syllables "ny" is added as a prefix as in " Ufa(crack) - nyufa(cracks) and if it has more, the "u" is dropped as in "ukuta(wall) - kuta(walls). Some of them might also start with /w/ as in "wakati(time)" and when following the rules it becomes "nyakati(times) in plural. Class 14 > "U-U" ; Refer to abstract nouns mainly and so don't really have there own plural. There is also the "U-YA" as stated in the video which is kind of hard to explain as there are a few words in it and very few similarities among them. Look at "uyoga(mushroom)-mayoga(mushrooms)" and "ugonjwa(disease)- magonjwa(diseases). It all comes down to just knowing what words belong to it. There is also a class for uncountable nouns that is "YA-YA". This class is comprised of only liquids as far as I know. But some liquids are considered not be in a different class like tea (chai) which is considered to be in the "I-I" class which i believe only has things like sugar( sukari) and salt (chumvi) as the only nouns in it other than tea. Class 15 > "KU-KU" ; Only for infinitives like to run, "kukimbia", or to read, "kusoma". This is not to be confused with the locative class "KU" which in an informal context where class isn't considered may commonly be confused with. This is because the locative class is used a lot more than the infinitives one. So the listener is more used to hearing the locative and will consider the it first before noticing the infinitives. Class 16,17&18 > "PA-KU-MU" ; This is the locative class that only has "mahali" or "pahali" as the only nouns. The "PA" is used for specific places or when both the listener and speaker know the place being talked about. The "KU" is used for generalised places. That's why you may find prepositions like "kwenye" for "on" originating from this class. But sometimes the meaning of those prepositions changes depending on context. And the last one "MU" is used for internal places. Like when referring to places within something. Nouns here are derived by adding the suffix "-ni", not to be confused for the ones used in verbs to indicate plurality when talking to people, to the end of another noun. That noun now refers to the internal place of it. As in "shule" for school then "shuleni" for inside the school as a place. All the noun classes I've mentioned refer to the concords used in Swahili or more specifically the ones used in verbs to indicate subject. Examples: Mti ulikatwa- The tree was cut Miti ilikatwa- Trees were cut And so on.......

I personally like the approach taken in A Grammar of Gyeli the most, where every combination of classes a noun can trigger agreement in between singular and plural is considered to be its own gender. Gyeli has 9 classes, but it's analysed as having 6 major genders and 11 minor ones, with every observed combination, like the two nouns that have 8/6 agreement for singular/plural, counted as its own minor gender.

Now we know what the discord question was for, amazing video, love it

With your interpretation of noun classes/genders, can the measuring word system of Chinese be regarded as a noun class system? Nouns are divided into groups that affect how the number words should change/which measuring words should be attached to the number words.

Originally Bantu had pre-prefix and class prefixes. Yule, takes the agreement of the pre-prefix the reason it looks similar in Ki and Vi is the pre-prefix and class prefix were identical eg Ki-ki-ntu. A person might have been Gu-Mu-ntu, where the G transforms to a Y in Yule. Lumsaba in Uganda still uses pre-prefix. Swahili does in some little-known constructions like Majitu (MiJitu in Mombasa) for giants, singular however is Jitu. The pre-prefix is present in the Interlacustriune languages and Nguni languages where it is reduced to an initial vowel as in A-ma-Zulu, A-Ba-Zulu, U-Mu-Ntu, I-si-Zulu.Bantu languages are fascinating though. I would love to know more about what is termed the Semi-Bantu languages. Some seem to have class affixes, rather than prefixes or a similar, but smaller noun class system, with unrelated vocabulary.

Brilliant ..all the best.

I love learning about different cultures and places. It’s very fascinating. Especially as someone who doesn’t really fit in with any culture 😅 not even my own. I mostly do my own thing and remain mostly solo

Dear K Klein, noun classes like you are describing are different from gender in a very particular way. Gender is a class of noun that is associated with all inflected nouns for the same dictionary entry. This is an important information because the fact that multiple dictionary entries (multiple categories of things) are subsumed by a generic category (a gender) implies that not only words but also things are being categorised. As for me, I do not see any problem for a language to have 17, 20 or more genders (generic categories of things). We have many more common nouns and corresponding categories in our languages, so I see here no actual problem. To start studying how these generic categories organize human experience, I would suggest you verify the genders for different species of plants, animals, land facilities/amenities and agricultural tools. I imagine that farm animals will be divided into two genders for the same species (male vs female) and that wild animals will be divided into groups such as flying preys, running preys and predators like they do in European languages. Think a little bit more about it again. You may find out interesting facts about Swahili that have not yet been published.

In school we learned the verb based version instead of adjectives. So m/wa becomes a/wa ( mtu *a*likuja / watu *wa*likuja - a person came/people came). All living things (plants not included) get grouped to the a/wa class except when exaggerating the size of the object. Mtoto *a*mekula (a/wa) - the child has eaten, becomes kitoto *ki*mekula (ki/vi) - the (small) child has eaten I can't remember all of them but they were 22 ngeli in total.

At times I use the prefixes on certain languages or people groups coz of the noun class system in Swahili and Luhya

what he was trying to explain is "ngeli". i think it should be approached as it is. if you try to apply logic from other languages you know it gets compicated really quick. i know since swahili is one of my native "bantu" languages. the rules change again completely again for "nilote", "cushite", etc tribe languages. i also learnt scandinavian languages and english as well as french. as well as a bit japanese and chinese and korean. here is what i learnt ultimately. languages are continent based they might be somewhat different but the structure and how they do thing is similar if they are from the same continent. asian language logic is hard to use when learning english. in the same way european language logic is hard to use when learning asian or african languages. depending on if your know another language in that continent use that, if not dont use anything, learn it a new.

Glad you chose Italian as a foil for Swahili ✌️🇮🇹

"Let's bring stuff to the coast and sell it and become the Swahili on the Swahili coast" said the Swahili on the Swahili coast

About Italian, wouldn’t the world classes be 5 rather than 4, since there are lots of words that end with “e” as a singular and as “i” with a plural and that can both be masculine and feminine?

From my experience of learning Turkish it actually makes little sense to use grammatical categorisations of a language that doesn’t really work within that language. You try to compare different languages but they don’t really work the same. Take prepositions for example. I’m Turkish the equivalent consists of affixes so that it is part of the noun itself. You have pronouns in Turkish, but also verbs have affixes depending on the person. And normally you omit the pronouns when you already have an affix indicating who you’re talking about. What I learned is that it makes more sense to describe a language using the grammar that the speakers uses. So I guess if Kiswahili speakers don’t use grammatical genders, then it probably isn’t needed to count them. And let us not forget: If every language was interchangeable, words had exact equivalents, grammar could be translated, expressions was the same. Then you don’t really need more than one language. The FUNCTION of several languages is that they describe things differently. They have their own expressions and nuances that makes them unique from other languages. So the differences are more important than the similarities if that makes sense.

Very interesting!

Thanks for providing another detailed peek into linguistics. Really enjoying these videos. I will save this one and send it to all my friends who, even after living in Berlin for 6 years, don't speak German and complain about the grammar. Btw, this reminds me a lot of people claiming Hungarian has "26 cases", when in fact I more see them like "word modifier options", replacing prefixes, adjectives, prepositions, etc. especially because they are so regular and predictable. Like a computer-menu-system.

While using “gender” to describe all noun classing systems is not accurate, I think it is useful to at least use when introducing the concept of noun classes, especially to speakers of indo-european languages. I know for me, Spanish and Romance languages were my first introduction to a foreign language and, though I thought gender was a weird thing to do to a noun, it’s pretty easy to understand. Once you start getting into cases, it’s easy to compare them to genders or (more usefully) conjugations of verbs, but for nouns. Obviously, for IE languages, those are the extent of our classifications, and it’s easy to separate them out into gender/plurality/case, but classing nouns in other languages should be taught as a more general idea of taking those classifications and abstracting them out even further.

In Oluluyia , we possess almost similar noun classes to Swahili

Ukrainian technically has noun classes in addition to genders, nouns and corresponding adjectives will. And as you say it's filled with exceptions as well as parallel options (two or three different inflection patterns will fit a single noun, with prevalence of one changing regionally, but it's not simply a dialect thing because they coexist to a large degree in literature and formal speech, so they're all valid in standardised language)

5:15 For romanian i see it as a possibility that the noun class system _could_ become more complicated (but obviously still not as complex as swahilis), because there are feminine nouns that have whatd generally be considered a masculine ending roată -> roți (f) poartă -> porți (f) mut -> muți (m) tont -> tonți (m) So i wouldnt be surprised if this agreement change development would occur, from what i remember those feminine nouns did originally have an -e plural ending, but it got reduced to just final palatalisation. I dont know during what period this development occured, and if that period wouldve given it enough time for the agreement change to occur if there wasnt any other factor that wouldnt let the change appear for some reason that will continue to not let it change. Dont know if there are any similar cases with words in italian.

this is completely unrelated but when I was a kid one of my friends taught me Spanish words and said that they were Swahili and I completely believed him.

Ok. This is absolutely way way beyond my linguistic skills.

Are class 1 and class 3 (both m-) distinguishable?

Nooooo you shouldn't put gender on a word of something that's not alive Swahilli: hehe 20 gender go brrrr

There are actually 8 noun classes in Kiswahili. It’s a characteristic of most Bantu languages called Ngeli where the first noun creates an alliteration in the rest of the sentence. Also the classes are named after the first morpheme on the verb that follows the noun, so the noun classes are 1. A-WA 2.U-I 3. LI-YA 4. KI- VI 5. U-YA 6. U-ZI 7. KU 8. PA-MU-KU

Never before have I been so confused after seeing something explained clearly in terms that I fully understand

Xhosa has a click in the name and I can’t tell if you used it or just /k/ in its place

I love Swahili so much it’s such a beautiful sounding and interesting language

My favorite gender system is Dyirbal’s: masculine, dangerous, edible plant, and miscellaneous

Saying German has polyplural nounclasses makes it sound that much more complicated. (der, die, das > die Pl.) (er, sie, es > sie Pl.)

I have a freind that speaks Swahili, he is from Tanzania

Italian also has l' for words of both genders that start with a vowel, lo for masculine words beginning with a consonant cluster starting with s and ones starting with z. In the plural, these turn into gli. So italian has in total these articles for it's two grammatical genders and tenses: masculine singular: il, lo, l' feminine singular: la, l' masculine plural: i, gli feminine plural: le

the cases video!!

Basque, Georgian Turkish One class ( or two if one counts plurals)

cool and good video

Interestingly, these nouns classes get reviewed every once in a while. The noun classes I learned as a kid are slightly different from what kids are being taught now at school. Even more interesting is that, for informal situations, noun classes really don't seem to matter much as most Swahili speakers in Kenya will just ignore them altogether. I find that the main objective of informal Swahili, as with many other languages is to convey ideas in as few words as possible. This often involves completely ignoring the formal rules of syntax while at times combining foreign words and mashing them up to resemble Swahili words. It often results in something that, in formal Swahili, makes absolutely no sense, yet is strangely well accepted and understood. It's all quite interesting.

I can relate, most Bantu languages possess a noun class system

Then wait what's the difference between noun classes/gender and grammatical cases? Not very familiarize with a lot of languages grammar

"theres only 2 genders" mfs when they see swahili

Wait so "noun classes" wasn't supposed to be a more general term, applied to *all* languages? I was under the impression that it was just the more correct way to refer to "grammatical gender", and I will continue to use it that way.

That was not a video about languages right? it was a video about quantum physics or something

2:17 It’s hiding on the 13th floor of a hotel somewhere in The Bermuda Triangle.

minute 3:55 Simba yule, Simba Wale..not ile zile...

4:33 you are assuming that the singular represents the noun instead of the plural, but why?

Is there any objective way to measure the complexity of a language's grammar? I'm coming at this as a complete layman, but it seems like this sort of grammar is a lot more complex than English. Is this wrong, or is English grammar equally complex in ways that are hard for me, as a native speaker, to understand?

Are there straight forwards rules for gender assignments? I read it on wikipedia: class 1 & 2 are people and a few exceptions. Class 9 mostly for loanwords. Are there lots of exceptions to the phonetic/ semantic rules? Comments here are comparing the sheer NUMBER of noun classes/ genders but they don't realize the NUMBER =/= complexity for L2 learners. German has 3 genders and it is very hard to guess the gender (gender assignment chaotic). A language can have 70 genders and it can be simplistic if the assignment rules are clear without many exceptions. Also, some gender/ noun class systems have collapsed a lot. Eg. In Wolof, 50% of the words belong to -bi gender despite it has 7+ noun classes.

This seems like a confusing way to present this material. I learned it as "genders are noun classes. Some languages have more noun classes. Some have none. And some languages also have nominalizef verbs which are given npun cases. Using masculine and feminine articles is just one way of marking a noun class."

Noun classes in Swahili it's called ngeli

Ive always thought about plural in german as its own class or gender, because masculine feminine and neuter collapse into it when plural

As an italian I'm proud of my language being present in a swahili language video

I used to fluently speak swahili as a kid but after watching this vid and seeing laws I just used to know without thinking about it is now making me feel like I'll never learn swahili again 😭

I love grammatical gender (noun classes) like this, and my favorite troll thing to do is to refer to the noun classes (counting classes? Whatever) in Chinese, Japanese and Korean as grammatical genders to be obnoxious XD

Italian "neuter" nouns could be aeen as 1,4.

Synthetic languages will really show you a spreadsheet and call it a language. /hs

how is the plural of ugomvi magomvi, its plural remains the same because in swahili we classify them as nouns that cannot be counted, so it remains ugomvi in plural, just like uji(porridge) it remains uji in its plural form. these kind of nouns fall in the U-U class

Wait when did it happen, that the plurals are considered as a whole different gender and not a subcategory of the gender of the singular? That’s how it is in Italian at least

As a Kiswahili and Bantu speaker from southern Uganda, we just ignore the genders and go absolutely without the grammar rules, which makes for a “Ugandan dialect”

Square space god damn karl

Why would it be confusing that there's no class 13 in Swahili but not if there's no floor 13 in American buildings?

Interesting, but a bit confusing. Norwegian also has some feminine and masculine nouns that look like they switch gender in the plural, but grammatically they still function as their correct gender

Im learning kiswahili and Im going insane

Wait: Italian dropped the Latin neutrum and just kept the masculinum and femininum? Old German speaker here: we learned the noun classes/ grammatical genders by learning: neutrum: das Kind (the child) masculinum: der Mann or der Vater (the man or the father) femininum: die Frau or die Mutter (the woman or the mother). This nicely enforced the impression that language kind of mirrored the "natural" gender. You know: you start off as a nondescript kid and after puberty change into male or female. This led to interesting conversations among us kids. Something about der Tisch (the table) must make it recognizable as "male" - That's where people get the idea from to endow totally genderless things with genderized adjectives. So the sun is described differently if it's a Spanish masculine or a German feminine sun 🙄🖖