The Awful German Language (1880)

I would outlaw noun gendering globally. Does it serve any semantic purpose? It does damn good job at making learning unnecessarily difficult.

It adds some additional entropy without making the words themselves longer. This both helps when communicating over an imperfect communication channel, like talking in a noisy place.

A minor benefit is that references with words like "this" are less ambiguous when gendered, and you can unambiguously reference multiple things as long as they have different gender

They're very useful: if you use two nouns in a sentence chances are they're not the same gender. That makes referring back to them very easy as you can do that by gender only, without repeating the nouns or other complicated sentence structure.

It can be useful, but only in the off chance that they're of different genders. But all this is at the expense of canonically having assigned genders to nouns, which the speaker has no way to compute or derive. In other words, even if I know the very word I want to utter, I can't legally form the correct sentence until I know its gender. All things considered, to me, the cost outweighs the benefits.

> even if I know the very word I want to utter

The gender is part of the word. If you don’t know the gender, then no, you don’t know the word.

There is no way to compute that “dog” begins with the letter “d”, even if you know that the remainder is “og”. So should we ban words that begin with “d”? Of course not. In German you must memorize “der Hund”, not just “Hund”, just like in English you must memorize “dog”, not “_og with unspecified first letter”.

Wait until you hear about adjective and verb gendering. ~

On a more serious note, it's a backwards compatibility thing. Taking a language with grammatical gender and removing it changes the way it looks and sounds rather drastically - more so for some than others. Needless to say, existing speakers are unlikely to appreciate it even if they don't care for gender qua gender.

(See also: numerous polls on how native Spanish speakers react to "Latinx" etc)

The spelling of the word, and its assigned gender, are two different things. Spelling makes you recognize the word. Gender doesn't contribute anything to semantics, is my point. It's not also the case that 'der' is merely a 3-letter prefix to any or every other word. It is rather irregularly applied, completely unrelated to the function the word serves. Not only that, the entire sentence has to be phrased differently depending on what the gender is. So, no: gender is not just longer spelling. Gender exists even if you decide not to write down the word.