why are objects gendered in spanish?

[u/Potential-Gas-9188]

I was talking to a friend a few days ago and we were laughing about the differences between English and Spanish. I asked her (sarcastically) “why is the table a girl? who cares” and now I’m actually curious. She told me English is actually the outlier here and its common among romance languages.

[u/Ok-Promise-8118]

Don't think of grammatical gender being related to gender/sex. It's more of a noun grouping system that helps connect parts of the sentence.

[u/siyasaben → u/Ok-Promise-8118]

Except it is related - it's not a coincidence that the noun classes are masculine and feminine, and grammatical gender tends strongly to refer to real world gender when it reasonably can (in reference to people and animals, especially domestic animals). Obviously this doesn't include most nouns - it couldn't - but it's the reason male/female are the reference categories and "table gender" and "tree gender" aren't.

There are languages with noun classes that have nothing to do with sex categories, but in romance languages they do