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Spanish speaking friends: Is there any documentation on how it was decided whether various objects were "male" or "female"? Or do various nouns just have particular genders for no specific reason beyond someone arbitrarily decided it at some point in the past?
This actually isn't even specific to Spanish, any other romantic language speaking friends feel free to chime in as well
I'm pretty sure something like this isn't *decided* per se. People use different genders for words based on region, etc. Eventually one becomes the standard.
In Germany people have been arguing over the gender of Nutella for quite a while 
(It's das Nutella btw, not die 
)
Wait I thought German was neuter for inanimate objects? I though that's where English got it from o_O
Yeah, most of it is from the sound. In Portuguese, most of it comes from words that end in a or o. Mesa, for example (table) is female because of the a at the end
Right, I get that part of it (Mesa is the same in Spanish). But who decided it was mesa rather than meso and why?
I actually didn't know that French was different from Spanish here. I just assumed they both inherited it from Latin (I know virtually zero French)
We have the same in portuguese, and it appears to be completely random to me, some objects that are "male" in Portuguese are "female" in Spanish for example
Even as a native (French) speaker, the assignment of genders feels completely arbitrary. It's not necessarily based on some inherent property of the object since synonyms can have different genders.
To dig deeper into the topic, the term you want to search is "grammatical gender". There's more out there than just masculine/feminine and optionally neuter. For example, the Innu language classifies its nouns as animate/inanimate.
From a French POV: feels very random. We even have words that change gender between singular and plural... Also genders between French and German are very different. Sometimes different between French and say Italian or Spanish... Now I wish French had a true neutral
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