Not at all. We lost it due to various invasions of the British Isles by non-native English-speakers who dropped gendered English because it was difficult to learn and didn’t immediately transfer from the Scandinavian languages to the western Germanic languages.
Meanwhile, the Celtic-speaking peoples of England, who in the first place spoke Celtic languages that are closer to the Romance languages than they are to the Germanic languages, never really adopted pure Old English and all of its genders in the first place.
The upshot is that through all this mess we ended up with something like Middle English, which doesn’t use gender at all, but that still uses case, as in hither vs thither.
Finally, by about the time of Shakespeare, we start transitioning into modern spoken English wherein we don’t use case or gender at all, and instead use grammar and context to communicate the same things that in the past would have been communicated through gendered and case-based language.
I wish it were that easy in German!
Old English used to have feminine, masculine and neuter like most of the other Germanic languages, but we lost it for various historical reasons.
The reasons: it’s dumb
Embrace the THE
Based THE enjoyer
Not at all. We lost it due to various invasions of the British Isles by non-native English-speakers who dropped gendered English because it was difficult to learn and didn’t immediately transfer from the Scandinavian languages to the western Germanic languages.
Meanwhile, the Celtic-speaking peoples of England, who in the first place spoke Celtic languages that are closer to the Romance languages than they are to the Germanic languages, never really adopted pure Old English and all of its genders in the first place.
The upshot is that through all this mess we ended up with something like Middle English, which doesn’t use gender at all, but that still uses case, as in hither vs thither.
Finally, by about the time of Shakespeare, we start transitioning into modern spoken English wherein we don’t use case or gender at all, and instead use grammar and context to communicate the same things that in the past would have been communicated through gendered and case-based language.