Because languages aren't constructed, they 'evolved' naturally from humans communicating with one another for many generations. As such, they aren't intended to be as simple as possible. They aren't intended in the first place. They've grown over time with no regard for whether the rules makes sense because nobody designed those rules, they just happened.

It probably seems extra complexity for you, if your language does not use it. For native speakers it is just natural and not using it would be at least weird.

We could ask the same question about articles . Those 'the' and 'a', why use them? It only makes English language harder to use! 'Apple is apple' why add another meaningless word?

Of course after learning and using English for years I see the meaning of 'a' and 'the' and thy feel quite natural for me to (though sometimes they still make little sense to me – all the fights whether 'The' can be used with some proper name or not). The point is: a lot of features of a foreign language will fill alien and unnecessary.

Maybe more on topic, that is how/why gendered words work in Polish: noun gender is usually linked to how it ends (but do not confuse that with suffixes of grammatical cases). Virtually all Polish women names end with 'a', so any other noun ending in 'a' sounds feminine and would be used in similar way. And sometimes it just 'rhymes' – like in 'to jabkło' ('this apple' – neuter), 'ta gruszka' ('this pear' – feminine), 'ten banan' ('this banana' – masculine). Of course thing get much more complicated than that (like in every language, just in different parts of the language).

People were just talking in the way that it was convenient for them. And thousands years later scholars called this feature of particular set of languages 'gender' because words used seem to be related to genders.

It's a thing that can happen as more complex case ending systems like Latin lose audible distinctions over time.

You might think that'd just result in linguistic gender being skipped in favor of no case endings altogether like English, but that's not why English is theorized to have nixed gender.

Linguists have started to theorize that the Danelaw is what killed english grammatical gender, as old English and Old Norse were similar-ish languages at the time with a decent level of mutual intelligibility, but the big sticking point would have been disagreements on grammatical gender between the two languages. So the theory goes that inhabitants of the Danelaw just kinda stopped using it to facilitate less confusing mutual conversation when interacting with a speaker of the other language, and eventually that innovation spread south with the unification of the seven kingdoms into England.

What this tells us is that given a language with grammatical gender, it takes a very narrow set of circumstances to facilitate the conditions where a group might naturally innovate genderless communication.

What's actually kinda interesting is that Esperanto is having a moment like this, while technically you are to use the pronouns Li and Sxi, for he and her, Duolingo has a lot of the use of Si, which is a singular they, and since a lot of esperanto's modern speakers are duolingo users, a lot of folks are just using si.

oftentimes grammatical gender actually makes the language easier, paradoxically, and I'm sure there's a really good explanation out there

The simple answer I'm seeing on a quick review is that it is a way to simplify the complexity of the many possible nouns that could be uttered.

"LA pap"
"LE pep"

These are imaginary words but the articles will help distinguish them from each other for a native speaker. They sound similar but I know it was "pap" and not "pep" because I also heard "la".

Also, gender is just ONE of the many possible dimensions used by noun classes in language. There are also things like size and animate/inanimate that are used by languages.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noun_class

There is benefit to complexity. When you say "Mike and Susan went back home because he forgot his suitcase", you don't have to repeat Mike three times because the gendered pronouns carry that information, but you also know who the suitcase belongs to and who forgot it.

Complexity is a benefit when it comes to language, as it allows greater or more robust transfer of information. There's a good comment downthread about how gender makes a language more robust: you know which object a pronoun refers to.

I'll point out that English is not free of gendered nouns, either: Ships, cities, and most nations are feminine, for example.

I am quite disappointed. I also think same exact question as my native language is not gender based. I expect to see answers based on studies or research. Much that I see here are opinions. Lemmy doesn't seem to have subject matter experts.

Case by case scenario. Man vs woman is simplest one. One gives the fuck, the other takes the fuck. Hence why gay men that took it were seen as less than equal to other men. And why men were seen as providers.

Some jobs were only done by men so only a noun for men was associated. Same for women.

Some biological functions were named after astral phenomenons, like menstruation.

Some locations and names were popularized through misunderstandings and mistranslation, like turkey - which has a different country name depending on where you are.
Or the more common ones are things like "Fuck knows", "nowhere's arsehole", "between your mom's legs", "my goat's testicles", "where my cow shits", "the middle between fuck off and kiss my ass" etc.

There is no real rhyme or reason. Each word has its own origin and they can all be very far apart from the intentions of their creators. Nor could those creators know the evolution of their choice in verbalizing some ideas the way they did.

Don't search for unity where there is none.

Robwords has an interesting video on this subject.

https://youtu.be/bKaVI-IStNE

Languages don't care about complexity. Look at Polish. It's like it makes things complex on purpose. Language evolution is not only about simplifying thing. It's also about conveying meaning and will adapt to the culture that uses it.

It makes the language richer and more beautiful in my opinion