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Both my native language (Russian) and the one I use the most (Hebrew) have gendered words. The first one has a "middle" neutral gender, and the latter one even has a full set of gendered pronouns, every pronoun except for "I" has a goddamn gender. This shit is endlessly confusing and makes no practical sense except to annoy people using these languages.
That's one of the reasons why I love English so much, English is nice.
English is morphologically nice but syntactically painful:
And IMO the interesting part is that the syntactical painfulness - let's call it complexity - is partially caused by the morphological lack of complexity. Human language requires a certain amount of complexity; if you remove it from the words themselves it'll end in how the words interact with each other.
English hates you. And me. It just hates. If you think it’s being nice, that’s because it’s trying to lull you into a false sense of security.
Though I was born and raised in the US, my first language was Spanish. All I ever knew my entire childhood was that at home we spoke Spanish. I learned English via tv, books, and then school. Fast forward to now, I recently came back from a 2.5 week trip to Brazil. I loved Brazil, the Portuguese language, and the people in Brazil. Still, when I got to the airport in the US and heard the PA say something in English, it felt so calm. English is a calm language to me. I hadn't realized it until that moment.
Hey, at least "they" for a group of people doesn't imply the genders of each person in that group (I'm thinking of Spanish ellos/ellas).
Identifying the gender of the subject has some practicality.