Narwhal (narwhal)'s status on Monday, 11-May-15 00:30:24 UTC

Narwhal orungano

@tiffany What's funny is grammatical gender actually existed in Old English, it just fell out around the 13th century when Middle English became more prominent and generally only used natural gender as opposed to grammatical gender. You could also say it's simply from the paradigm shift towards a more gender neutral language.

I guess the best way to explain gender in nouns to someone who speaks English exclusively is how in English you're more often than not call a ship or vessel "she" or "her". Grammatical gender is generally reflective of ostensible attributes of a noun.