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English:
What is the origin of gender in Spanish words? (la mesa, el perro) I come from another language (English) that doesn't have gender for nouns, except maybe a few things like ships, planes, etc.
I'm not complaining, just curious.
Español:
¿Cuál es el origen del género en las palabras en español? (la mesa, el perro) Yo vengo de otro idioma (Inglés) que no tiene género para los sustantivos, excepto tal vez algunas cosas como barcos, aviones, etc.
No me quejo, sólo es por curiosidad.
Gender is a grammatical feature that was present in Proto-Indo-European, that is, the common ancestor of a diverse group of languages including both English and Spanish, as well as Greek and Hindi. The development of that is an interesting read.
Both Anglo-Saxon and Latin (the languages from which English and Spanish derive) had a three way gender distinction, masculine, feminine, and neuter. Along the way, English lost it, now only making a minimal distinction in animacy. You can see the process of gender loss by looking at Danish, another Germanic language, which depending on region has one, two, or three genders.
Most languages derived from Latin lost use of the neuter gender except under highly specific situations. It seems to me (don't quote me) that most neuter words switched to masculine in the development of Spanish. Romanian has a neuter, but it means that nouns function as masculine in singular, and feminine in plural. Asturian likewise has neuter, but primarily uses neuter for uncountable/mass nouns, though it does have its own ending.
Grammatical gender is really just a special type of noun-classing, which is common in many other languages (if you think two or three genders are hard, try Zulu with fifteen genders/classes!). Looking at Bantu languages (of which Zulu is a member), one might be able to hazard guesses as to the origins of gender in PIE in terms of semantic categorization.
If you're more curious about how a given new word in Spanish acquires its gender, that's a pretty complicated topic. Most imported words are masculine, unless the language the word came from has M/F gender and then it tends to preserve that gender, but not always. Sometimes, a word will be imported and obtain two different genders based on region (el/la Internet, el/la computador(a)), so there's no single rule. Sometimes a word I might make up just sounds like it should be one gender or another, but that's pretty subjective.
Spanish is a Romance language derived from Latin (through Vulgar Latin) which had the gender distinction for all nouns. And thus the gender distinction rule persists in Spanish. I believe it helps in rearranging the order of sentences and constructing complex sentences without confusion.
Old English also had genders for inanimate objects but it has disappeared over time in modern English.
John McWhorter PhD Linguistics (Stanford) expounds this, in The Power of Babel (2003).
