>I've never understood the need for noun genders and I scratch my head at a society that makes its members memorize such useless information.
Society doesn't make anybody do anything. Languages are not built in labs, they grow evolutionary and organically (with some bureaucratic intervention here and there).
For that particular people, following the historical lineages they went through, those things evolved in their language.
Plus, instead of seeing them as "useless information" (where the main concern is crudely expressing the most basic concepts to another, e.g. utilitarian communication), one could see them as a richer way of describing the world than English, and with more expressive power (not just for raw communication, for expression of feelings, poetry, etc as well).
(In fact a common point to many European essays from the past 200 or so years is how English is a cruder language suited mainly for "commerce").
Society doesn't make anybody do anything. Languages are not built in labs, they grow evolutionary and organically (with some bureaucratic intervention here and there).
For that particular people, following the historical lineages they went through, those things evolved in their language.
Plus, instead of seeing them as "useless information" (where the main concern is crudely expressing the most basic concepts to another, e.g. utilitarian communication), one could see them as a richer way of describing the world than English, and with more expressive power (not just for raw communication, for expression of feelings, poetry, etc as well).
(In fact a common point to many European essays from the past 200 or so years is how English is a cruder language suited mainly for "commerce").