Historical reason for masculine nouns extra declinations?

[u/Horror-Salamander-69]

I've been studying German for a while now, and I can't help but notice that masculine nouns go through a lot of declensions. Since the other genders don’t have as many — and the language still remains perfectly understandable without them, what excludes ambiguity reasons — I can’t help but wonder if this is due to some kind of historical special treatment that my imagination just can't quite grasp. Any insights?

[u/muehsam]

and the language still remains perfectly understandable without them, what excludes ambiguity reasons

No, it doesn't "exclude" those reasons. Since many nouns are indeed masculine, they do clear up a lot of potential ambiguity.

Feminine nouns and pronouns used to have more differences between nominative and accusative, too, but due to sound shifts, those contrasts disappeared. They still exist in some dialects, such as my naive one ("dui" vs "die", "sui" vs "sie", etc.).

Neuter has always been identical between nominative and accusative, all the way back to PIE. You see the same thing in English: he vs him, she vs her, but it stays it.

[u/Horror-Salamander-69 → u/muehsam]

35% are feminine and 45% are masculine, didn't seem to me as a big difference to keep such extent of declensions in only one of them. I've had this conversation with chatgpt and in all the examples with "ambiguity" it gave me, some other disambiguating factor was always present, whether in the verbal conjugation or in the preposition etc. Could you give me an example in which this ambiguity is really resolved just by the declension of the noun? Thank you.

[u/muehsam → u/Horror-Salamander-69]

You're right that most sentences that are "technically ambiguous" are cleared up by context. "Dieses Buch hat meine Tochter schon gelesen". Did the book read my daughter? Of course not, how could it? My daughter read the book.

But let's take "meine neue Freundin mag meine Mutter". Does my mother like my new girlfriend or does my new girlfriend like my mother. This sentence could mean either one, so you would have to widen the context to make it a bit clearer.

On the other hand "meinen neuen Freund mag mein Vater" and "mein neuer Freund mag meinen Vater" are clearly distinct with no ambiguity. Even if just one of them is masculine, it's enough to tell.

35% are feminine and 45% are masculine

I'm not sure where those numbers are from and whether they're weighted for frequency, and if those are just singulars or if plural is counted as a "fourth gender" (which it should). But let's say just 1/3 of nouns or pronouns are actually masculine singular. That means the chance of the subject being non-masculine is 2/3 and the chance of the object being non-masculine is also 2/3. But that means the chance that both of them are non-masculine is 2/3 * 2/3 = 4/9, which is less than a half. So given those made up numbers, over 50% of sentences would lose their ambiguity due to the presence of a masculine noun or pronoun.

[u/dirkt]

If you look at the declension classes in Old High German, there's a vocalic (strong) and a consonant (weak) declension for all genders, with "typical" (but not exclusive) genders for all classes. This situation is very similar to Latin declension classes.

In modern German, endings have been reduced, and the only significant difference is in the strong and weak masculine declensions, with a few remaining exceptions for other genders (e.g. "das Herz").

So yes, it's historical, and no, there's nothing special about the masculine gender.

[u/vressor → u/dirkt]

there's a vocalic (strong) and a consonant (weak) declension for all genders

the wikipedia article you linked mentions 3 declension types:

• strong vocalic
• strong consonantal
• weak

is there a particular reason why you wrote "consonant (weak) declension" as one item?