Ron Johnson wrote: ...
Being a native speaker of American, I've always wondered - What is the purpose of "gender" in grammar/language?
as far as I can tell there's no purpose (not a linguist but my native language has genders, can't find any reason other then that it has genders:-)
- Is it only the European/Latinate languages that have the gender concept?
lot of them has the same gender concept: all slavic languages (russian, ukrainian, polish, slovak, czech, bulgarian, most (all?) languages in former yugoslavia etc.), I know spanish (more relevant since you ask about latin languages) has genders...
btw your european/latin seems to imply that european languages are latin languages, that's not the case...
- Why English doesn't have gender, since it's predecessor, German, does have gender?
looks like a lot of unneccessary stuff was removed from english language (last century or two?), as far as I can tell it's because it's used as a non-native language for pragmatic purposes (i.e. as long as the message gets accross it's all good:-)
erik