Posted January 14, 2015
Fever_Discordia: Incidentally I once heard that the reason we don't give things genders in English goes back to when the Vikings controlled the north of England and Saxons controlled the south and they developed a pidgin language to communicate so, yeah, I blame the Danes!
Blame them? Thank the Danes, I hope you mean! Yours is one of the few languages blessedly free of the abomination that is grammatical genders. They complicate things immensely, and add absolutely no semantic content to the language. Apart from that, Danish has two genders, just so you know. On the other hand, they are quite unusual. There is common gender (both male and female) and no gender (neither male nor female). So I don't think we specifically are to "blame" for the lack of genders in English (unless that was purely a function of the "common language" thing). On the other hand, the Vikings did not speak modern Danish, but rather old Norse. I believe the closest thing to it in modern terms is Icelandic, but I don't know if that has genders or not.