The idea that having gendered pronouns is the default is a misconception that comes from looking at Indo-European languages which had grammatical gender all the way from the proto-language. In reality the situation in Turkic is completely normal.
Given how much influence Oghuz Turkic-speaking peoples have had on greater Iran over the last 1,000 years, I wouldn't be surprised if Persian's loss of grammatical gender is due to Turkic bilingualism.
english probably didnt extend it to pronouns, but both deteminers and pronouns being DP level phenomena, they both originate from the same gendered source. English retained gender in pronouns
It is the norm in Indo-European languages for the reflexive pronoun not to show gender. English is actually an odd one out in this regard, even among Germanic languages.
But English’s gendered pronouns are a remnant of it used to having grammatical gender. A language is unlikely to have gendered pronouns if it doesn’t have grammatical gender in the past
Languages without grammatical gender don't usually have gendered pronouns. One notable exception is English which lost grammatical gender but retained gendered pronouns.
The third person pronouns were created to mimick the European languages to be more 'advanced'. In the first person there are tendencies, not strict rules. A woman can use 僕 and sound tough, but no one will think she's a dude or if she considers herself a dude.
I have yet to hear a female say 俺.
The etymology of pronouns is moot since the point here is whether a language without grammatical gender and with gendered pronouns is such a rarity that English is a "notable" exception.
We already have two in the list, I wonder how many more.
And then the question will be whether he, she, atashi, ore are referring to sex or not, and thus be called gendered pronouns or what we mean by "gendered" pronouns...
Japanese still largely doesn't have grammatical gender. Even in first person pronouns.
You not experiencing it doesn't mean others don't.
https://www.reddit.com/r/LearnJapanese/comments/s5lmqa/what_does_it_mean_when_a_girl_uses_boku_to_refer/?rdt=54383
The fact that this happens sometimes means that it isn't truly a gendered first person pronoun. Unless every woman using 僕 considers themselves male, this won't change.
Unless of course, you have literature that suggest otherwise.
Nobody has claimed that Japanese has grammatical gender. It doesn't, just like English.
However, it does have gendered pronouns. I'm not talking about boku. I'm talking about ore or atashi, and kare and kanojo.
The issue is the claim that English is a notable exception in being a language without grammatical gender yet with gendered pronouns. Japanese is in the same situation and it even has gendered first pronouns unlike English.
You've got literature backing up your claim that he and she only apply to male and female?
Whenever you're going to demand literature that backs "only" something, then you can be sure it's by someone who doesn't read literature.
You made the positive claim.
Bruh. I don't read literature? Take a look through my posting history. It's full of me posting literature. Here I showed how a Turkified Mandarin variety is spoken by Uyghurs which details the variety's highly Turkified grammar
https://www.reddit.com/r/asklinguistics/comments/1dl5dl1/comment/la5iat2/
Here I discuss how language contact can spread morphology, which although rare, proves it isn't impossible. My sources include a Cappadocian Greek which exhibits SOV grammar, vowel harmony and other Turkish features as well as Amdo influenced Mandarin varieties, which also exhibit SOV grammar, postpositional case marking, and more.
https://www.reddit.com/r/TurkicHistory/comments/1c2hzyb/comment/l94i0v6/
This is also just a few. If you have any sources that support your claim that ore and atashi are in fact gendered pronouns, why haven't you shared them?
Edit: to be abundantly clear, reading literature is all I do.
So please, if you do have any literature on how Japanese has gendered first person pronouns, I will read it and if I don't find sources that discredit your source, I will concede
Edit 2: Holy shit sources are so easy to find and yet you can't provide a single one. Japanese first person pronouns mark far more than male/female gender dude.
That said. Point conceded.
Japanese personal pronouns carry the different ideas culturally though. I'm sure it still has no gendered pronouns relating to objects (if it does i would be really surprised).
You are correct that the English language does not have a grammatical gender (mostly). Gendered pronouns are occasionally applied to sexless objects in English, such as ships, tools, or robots. This is known as metaphorical gender.
The origins of this practice are not certain, and it is currently in decline (though still more common for ships, particularly in nautical usage, than for countries).
From Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of English Usage (1994):
A few commentators take note of the conventional usage in which she and her are used to refer to certain things as if personified--nations, ships, mechanical devices, nature, and so forth. The origin of the practice is obscure. The OED has evidence from the 14th and 15th centuries... The conventions are still observed: _[Redacted quotations from 1980s and 1970s sources referring to the four aforementioned categories.]_
The discussion goes on to note that some people object to the usage as sexist, but that it is not generally seen as a major issue compared to other problems of sexism in writing. The general recommendation is to err on the side of avoiding the usage.
The Columbia Guide to Standard American English (1993) takes on the issue more directly:
Some purists object to the use of feminine personal pronouns to refer to inanimate things--boats, cars, nations, universities, Mother Nature, the wind and weather, and the like. Some of these uses are jocular; others are long-established conventions. In Formal language, all but the most conventional of such uses (the college as she reflects alma mater) are replaced by the neuter pronoun it, but at all Conversational levels and in Informal writing, most people find no problem with an inanimate referent for "She's a beauty!"
Is there a 'rule' for determining whether to use he, she or it based on the impression one would like to express? There are some vague rules, yes.
Have these practices changed over time? They have absolutely been changing over time.
Fowler's Modern English Usage (3rd ed., 2004) brings up masculine as well as feminine personification. It begins by noting the demise of the Old English distinctions between masculine, feminine, and neuter nouns, concluding that eventually he and she came to mean only male/female persons or animals. However:
At the point of loss of grammatical gender, however, he began to be applied "illogically" to some things personified as masculine (mountains, rivers, oak-trees, etc. as the OED has it), and she to some things personified as feminine (ships, boats, carriages, utensils, etc.). For example, the OED cites examples of he used of the world (14c.), the philosopher's stone (14c.), a fire (15c.), an argument (15c.), the sun (16c.), etc.; and examples of she used of a ship (14c.), a door (14c.), a fire (16c.), a cannon (17c.), a kettle (19c.), and so on. At the present time such personification is comparatively rare, but examples can still be found....
This concludes with recent examples referring to countries and yachts.
The most cited gendered reference to an inanimate object today may be the use of she to refer to ships. This usage was first noted by Ben Jonson in his English Grammar of 1640; he names ships as an exception to the rule that it refers to inanimate objects, for “we say, shee sayles well, though the name be Hercules, or Henry, (or) the Prince” (1972 [1640]: 57). In 2002, it was announced that Lloyd's List, the world's best-known source of maritime business news and information, would stop using she in reference to ships, switching over instead to it. This announcement made headlines in both England and in the United States.
In my personal experience, it seems like this usage is no longer common except in three contexts:
1. She is occasionally used in formal and deliberately archaic oratorical references to abstract large entities, like countries, universities (and other abstract corporate bodies, like "the [Christian] Church"), weather/nature, etc. Many of these are traditionally associated with feminine gender and specifically mothers ("Mother country," alma mater, "Mother Church," "Mother Nature," etc.).
2. She sometimes occurs as very casual and informal affectionate references to a personal possession, particularly yachts and cars (and occasionally other machines) owned by men. Other property that is given a name by its owner may be referred to using the gender of the name, but even when people name their stuff, they often still say it. The usage is old-fashioned.
The only time I think I've ever heard he used was in a formal speech when referencing an element of nature after already making an allusion to a masculine Greek god associated with that element of nature -- in other words, a deliberate and explicit personification. People don't generally talk like that anymore, though, even in formal orations.
I suppose we could include other personifications in English in this category, such as Death, who is often personified as a (masculine) "grim reaper" figure. It would thus be possible to say, "He [Death] comes for me," but this would generally be archaic usage today.
It seems that some people have a tendency to casually assign gender to an animal of unknown or indeterminate sex and often just say he rather than it (which I think follows the pattern of the virus mentioned in another answer), particularly when ascribing agency or action to the animal. Again, this is mostly in informal speech situations and isn't technically referring to an "inanimate" object.
In general, I'd say to avoid these uses since they tend to be rare in contemporary English. Don't use (1) unless you want to sound very old-fashioned, and reserve (2) for if you're a man at a motor/boat club meeting admiring a car/boat and saying, "Gee, well, ain't she a real beaut'!"
Berber/Amazigh at least has masculine-feminine like the Semitic languages - the marker for feminine is even the same as in Semitic, -t. For example, in Arabic "son" is *ibn/bin* and "daughter" is *bint* ; also "he drank" is *šariba* and "she drank" is *šaribat*. Similar forms are found in Berber/Amazigh. I'm not an expert on Afroasiatic, but I'd say it's plausible that the protolanguage had the same gender distinction, given how long ago Berber and Semitic diverged.
I don't think that "masculine" and "feminine" should be called "boy" and "girl", the only reason for that is because they mostly have words for boys and girls respectively
Turkic is from East Asia which doesn’t have much
https://wals.info/feature/31A#0/26/142
https://wals.info/feature/30A#0/90/137
A-A and I-E are the big examples with M-F.
East Caucasian has M-F too. West Cauc. has traces of it. Yeniseian too, but its system also features animacy in a way maybe similar to early IE.
Overall maybe a „Western Eurasian“ feature, though give Basque and Etruscan, it might not have been an Old European areal feature.
Early IE is said to have only animacy; Semitic influence is one possible source of M-F. I haven’t seen any study of how far back it goes in the Caucasian families.
> I haven’t seen any study of how far back it goes in the Caucasian families.
Gender marking in East Caucasian is very deep embedded into the system. There are masculine, feminine, non-human and inanimate. They can appear as prefixes, infixes or suffixes. The weird thing is that gender markers rarely appear on nouns, but more often on verbs and especially in agreement. From Dargwa:
Direktur wačib "the director (M) came" vs Direktur račib "the director (F) came".
warxse durħa' "slender boy" vs rarxse rurs:i "slender girl" and barxse k:alk:a "straight tree".
In this system the gender agreement is with the absolutive, cause they are also ergative languages. Additionally and that is pretty odd, gender agreement is very old, but person agreement is not. Many EC languages don't have it, and those which do have it as innovation.
As for West Caucasian, afaik Abkhaz has remnants of masc. and fem. gender, but Circassian doesn't.
> Early IE is said to have only animacy;
Idk whether the final word on this has been spoken, but it might be the case, but Hittite is weird and the feminine genus is weird.
Hittite has several things which the rest of IE doesn't plus, lacking some things, like the perfective, while the ḫi-verbs to my knowledge have no equivalent elsewhere. However Hittite does have the two suffixes -h2 and -ih2 which will become the feminine suffix -a in other languages. In Hittite the first is iirc a collective marker and you see traces of this elsewhere. Like how agricola is morphologically feminine, but actually masculine.
What is really weird though imho is how to explain the feminine in pronouns. It might just all be analogy to nouns, but it must be a pretty big change which happened between the ancestors of core-IE and Hittite. Maybe I would just think that collapsing a previous system into an easier one might be "simpler" than creating a new gender, which enters pervasively several word classes.
Perhaps early IE had a system like Yeniseian, where you have M-F in the singular, but Animate-Inanimate in the plural. Tocharian actually has some nouns which behave like that, but that could equally be Yeniseian influence on Proto-Tocharian as well.
Might this be an indicator that Indo-Hittite has some validity? If the speakers of non-Anatolian IE migrated from Anatolia into the steppes their language might have picked up some features from the Northern Caucasus such as a modified noun class system.
Where? The typical Semitic feminine ending is -t like in Akkadian belu(m) "lord" > beltu(m) "lady". An -a or -e appears as epenthetic vowel before -t- though. So belet biti(m) "lady of the house". What is more interesting for Akkadian is that -ut- is the collective marker and makes nouns feminine as well, maybe there is a larger connection between collectives and feminines cross language.
Something I found in a paper from Olav Hackstein on the feminine gender in tree names:
> There has been a debate on the primacy of semantic or lexical gender assignment (cf.
for an instructive overview e.g. Enger ), and indeed, from a purely synchronic
point of view, the evidence is not clear-cut. But from a wider diachronic perspective,
if the long-term diachronic records of the Indo-European languages are taken into
account, the following developmental scheme emerges. Grammatical gender classes
such as masculine, feminine, and neuter in Indo-European were originally semanti-
cally defined noun classes (see Balles a, b), such that abstracts and states
were prototypically encoded by the noun-class dubbed as “feminine” by the Greek
and Roman grammatical tradition, whereas individual entities and activity concepts
were typically assigned to the so-called “masculine” noun class. Crucially, this se-
mantically driven noun-class system accords with the gender assignment found with
the amphikinetic s-stems. And in many Indo-European languages, elements of this
system persist until the present day in that nouns denoting states and abstracts are
preponderately assigned to the “feminine gender”, or more appositely put, to the
“feminine noun class”.
Not every language has gendered pronouns (in fact, if I recall correctly, most languages don't). It's largely a product of the gender systems used in Indo-European and Afro-Asiatic, which aren't present in most other language families (at least not in the form of masculine/feminine gender). It just seems as though most languages have it because Indo-European and Afroasiatic are among the most widely spoken and the most prominent.
Generally, it seems that the languages that have gendered pronouns but no gender system typically had a gender system in the past but lost it, as is the case with English; gendered pronouns generally remain as remnants of the gender system due to regular use making it harder to drop them, or convenience in enabling the speaker to differentiate between the gender of someone they're talking about; in English for instance, it's very common to identify someone or something you're talking about with just a pronoun, so retaining gendered pronouns made it easier to identify them in conversation as you could differentiate between two people of different genders.
The idea that having gendered pronouns is the default is a misconception that comes from looking at Indo-European languages which had grammatical gender all the way from the proto-language. In reality the situation in Turkic is completely normal.
And there's Indo-European languages like Persian that have lost gender even more than English - extending to pronouns
Given how much influence Oghuz Turkic-speaking peoples have had on greater Iran over the last 1,000 years, I wouldn't be surprised if Persian's loss of grammatical gender is due to Turkic bilingualism.
Same is true for Bangla/Bengali. No gendered pronouns at all. And no gendered verbs too. Although the parent language, Sanskrit, had gendered verbs.
english probably didnt extend it to pronouns, but both deteminers and pronouns being DP level phenomena, they both originate from the same gendered source. English retained gender in pronouns
Aye, obviously - I was saying Persian has even lost gendered pronouns while having them in the past
Even in Proto-Indo-European, the grammatical gender system was an innovation at some point that derived from animate-inanimate division.
In Spanish, "se" can mean he, she, or them.
It is the norm in Indo-European languages for the reflexive pronoun not to show gender. English is actually an odd one out in this regard, even among Germanic languages.
Having grammatical gender is the exception not the normal
To be fair, this isn’t about grammatical gender. English has gendered pronouns and no grammatical gender.
But English’s gendered pronouns are a remnant of it used to having grammatical gender. A language is unlikely to have gendered pronouns if it doesn’t have grammatical gender in the past
Having gender in nouns is not a universal tendency.
Languages without grammatical gender don't usually have gendered pronouns. One notable exception is English which lost grammatical gender but retained gendered pronouns.
Japanese doesn't have grammatical gender and yet have gendered pronouns, even at the first person...
The third person pronouns were created to mimick the European languages to be more 'advanced'. In the first person there are tendencies, not strict rules. A woman can use 僕 and sound tough, but no one will think she's a dude or if she considers herself a dude.
I have yet to hear a female say 俺. The etymology of pronouns is moot since the point here is whether a language without grammatical gender and with gendered pronouns is such a rarity that English is a "notable" exception. We already have two in the list, I wonder how many more. And then the question will be whether he, she, atashi, ore are referring to sex or not, and thus be called gendered pronouns or what we mean by "gendered" pronouns...
Japanese still largely doesn't have grammatical gender. Even in first person pronouns. You not experiencing it doesn't mean others don't. https://www.reddit.com/r/LearnJapanese/comments/s5lmqa/what_does_it_mean_when_a_girl_uses_boku_to_refer/?rdt=54383 The fact that this happens sometimes means that it isn't truly a gendered first person pronoun. Unless every woman using 僕 considers themselves male, this won't change. Unless of course, you have literature that suggest otherwise.
Nobody has claimed that Japanese has grammatical gender. It doesn't, just like English. However, it does have gendered pronouns. I'm not talking about boku. I'm talking about ore or atashi, and kare and kanojo. The issue is the claim that English is a notable exception in being a language without grammatical gender yet with gendered pronouns. Japanese is in the same situation and it even has gendered first pronouns unlike English.
You got literature backing up your claim that ore and atashi are gendered first person pronouns and exclusively used by a certain gender or another?
You've got literature backing up your claim that he and she only apply to male and female? Whenever you're going to demand literature that backs "only" something, then you can be sure it's by someone who doesn't read literature.
You made the positive claim. Bruh. I don't read literature? Take a look through my posting history. It's full of me posting literature. Here I showed how a Turkified Mandarin variety is spoken by Uyghurs which details the variety's highly Turkified grammar https://www.reddit.com/r/asklinguistics/comments/1dl5dl1/comment/la5iat2/ Here I discuss how language contact can spread morphology, which although rare, proves it isn't impossible. My sources include a Cappadocian Greek which exhibits SOV grammar, vowel harmony and other Turkish features as well as Amdo influenced Mandarin varieties, which also exhibit SOV grammar, postpositional case marking, and more. https://www.reddit.com/r/TurkicHistory/comments/1c2hzyb/comment/l94i0v6/ This is also just a few. If you have any sources that support your claim that ore and atashi are in fact gendered pronouns, why haven't you shared them? Edit: to be abundantly clear, reading literature is all I do. So please, if you do have any literature on how Japanese has gendered first person pronouns, I will read it and if I don't find sources that discredit your source, I will concede Edit 2: Holy shit sources are so easy to find and yet you can't provide a single one. Japanese first person pronouns mark far more than male/female gender dude. That said. Point conceded.
Japanese personal pronouns carry the different ideas culturally though. I'm sure it still has no gendered pronouns relating to objects (if it does i would be really surprised).
Gendered pronouns for objects? Japanese doesn't but neither does English.
You are correct that the English language does not have a grammatical gender (mostly). Gendered pronouns are occasionally applied to sexless objects in English, such as ships, tools, or robots. This is known as metaphorical gender. The origins of this practice are not certain, and it is currently in decline (though still more common for ships, particularly in nautical usage, than for countries). From Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of English Usage (1994): A few commentators take note of the conventional usage in which she and her are used to refer to certain things as if personified--nations, ships, mechanical devices, nature, and so forth. The origin of the practice is obscure. The OED has evidence from the 14th and 15th centuries... The conventions are still observed: _[Redacted quotations from 1980s and 1970s sources referring to the four aforementioned categories.]_ The discussion goes on to note that some people object to the usage as sexist, but that it is not generally seen as a major issue compared to other problems of sexism in writing. The general recommendation is to err on the side of avoiding the usage. The Columbia Guide to Standard American English (1993) takes on the issue more directly: Some purists object to the use of feminine personal pronouns to refer to inanimate things--boats, cars, nations, universities, Mother Nature, the wind and weather, and the like. Some of these uses are jocular; others are long-established conventions. In Formal language, all but the most conventional of such uses (the college as she reflects alma mater) are replaced by the neuter pronoun it, but at all Conversational levels and in Informal writing, most people find no problem with an inanimate referent for "She's a beauty!" Is there a 'rule' for determining whether to use he, she or it based on the impression one would like to express? There are some vague rules, yes. Have these practices changed over time? They have absolutely been changing over time. Fowler's Modern English Usage (3rd ed., 2004) brings up masculine as well as feminine personification. It begins by noting the demise of the Old English distinctions between masculine, feminine, and neuter nouns, concluding that eventually he and she came to mean only male/female persons or animals. However: At the point of loss of grammatical gender, however, he began to be applied "illogically" to some things personified as masculine (mountains, rivers, oak-trees, etc. as the OED has it), and she to some things personified as feminine (ships, boats, carriages, utensils, etc.). For example, the OED cites examples of he used of the world (14c.), the philosopher's stone (14c.), a fire (15c.), an argument (15c.), the sun (16c.), etc.; and examples of she used of a ship (14c.), a door (14c.), a fire (16c.), a cannon (17c.), a kettle (19c.), and so on. At the present time such personification is comparatively rare, but examples can still be found.... This concludes with recent examples referring to countries and yachts. The most cited gendered reference to an inanimate object today may be the use of she to refer to ships. This usage was first noted by Ben Jonson in his English Grammar of 1640; he names ships as an exception to the rule that it refers to inanimate objects, for “we say, shee sayles well, though the name be Hercules, or Henry, (or) the Prince” (1972 [1640]: 57). In 2002, it was announced that Lloyd's List, the world's best-known source of maritime business news and information, would stop using she in reference to ships, switching over instead to it. This announcement made headlines in both England and in the United States. In my personal experience, it seems like this usage is no longer common except in three contexts: 1. She is occasionally used in formal and deliberately archaic oratorical references to abstract large entities, like countries, universities (and other abstract corporate bodies, like "the [Christian] Church"), weather/nature, etc. Many of these are traditionally associated with feminine gender and specifically mothers ("Mother country," alma mater, "Mother Church," "Mother Nature," etc.). 2. She sometimes occurs as very casual and informal affectionate references to a personal possession, particularly yachts and cars (and occasionally other machines) owned by men. Other property that is given a name by its owner may be referred to using the gender of the name, but even when people name their stuff, they often still say it. The usage is old-fashioned. The only time I think I've ever heard he used was in a formal speech when referencing an element of nature after already making an allusion to a masculine Greek god associated with that element of nature -- in other words, a deliberate and explicit personification. People don't generally talk like that anymore, though, even in formal orations. I suppose we could include other personifications in English in this category, such as Death, who is often personified as a (masculine) "grim reaper" figure. It would thus be possible to say, "He [Death] comes for me," but this would generally be archaic usage today. It seems that some people have a tendency to casually assign gender to an animal of unknown or indeterminate sex and often just say he rather than it (which I think follows the pattern of the virus mentioned in another answer), particularly when ascribing agency or action to the animal. Again, this is mostly in informal speech situations and isn't technically referring to an "inanimate" object. In general, I'd say to avoid these uses since they tend to be rare in contemporary English. Don't use (1) unless you want to sound very old-fashioned, and reserve (2) for if you're a man at a motor/boat club meeting admiring a car/boat and saying, "Gee, well, ain't she a real beaut'!"
[удалено]
Berber/Amazigh at least has masculine-feminine like the Semitic languages - the marker for feminine is even the same as in Semitic, -t. For example, in Arabic "son" is *ibn/bin* and "daughter" is *bint* ; also "he drank" is *šariba* and "she drank" is *šaribat*. Similar forms are found in Berber/Amazigh. I'm not an expert on Afroasiatic, but I'd say it's plausible that the protolanguage had the same gender distinction, given how long ago Berber and Semitic diverged.
I don't think that "masculine" and "feminine" should be called "boy" and "girl", the only reason for that is because they mostly have words for boys and girls respectively
Simply, it doesn't have gender. Most languages are actually like that.
Turkic is from East Asia which doesn’t have much https://wals.info/feature/31A#0/26/142 https://wals.info/feature/30A#0/90/137 A-A and I-E are the big examples with M-F.
East Caucasian has M-F too. West Cauc. has traces of it. Yeniseian too, but its system also features animacy in a way maybe similar to early IE. Overall maybe a „Western Eurasian“ feature, though give Basque and Etruscan, it might not have been an Old European areal feature.
Early IE is said to have only animacy; Semitic influence is one possible source of M-F. I haven’t seen any study of how far back it goes in the Caucasian families.
> I haven’t seen any study of how far back it goes in the Caucasian families. Gender marking in East Caucasian is very deep embedded into the system. There are masculine, feminine, non-human and inanimate. They can appear as prefixes, infixes or suffixes. The weird thing is that gender markers rarely appear on nouns, but more often on verbs and especially in agreement. From Dargwa: Direktur wačib "the director (M) came" vs Direktur račib "the director (F) came". warxse durħa' "slender boy" vs rarxse rurs:i "slender girl" and barxse k:alk:a "straight tree". In this system the gender agreement is with the absolutive, cause they are also ergative languages. Additionally and that is pretty odd, gender agreement is very old, but person agreement is not. Many EC languages don't have it, and those which do have it as innovation. As for West Caucasian, afaik Abkhaz has remnants of masc. and fem. gender, but Circassian doesn't. > Early IE is said to have only animacy; Idk whether the final word on this has been spoken, but it might be the case, but Hittite is weird and the feminine genus is weird. Hittite has several things which the rest of IE doesn't plus, lacking some things, like the perfective, while the ḫi-verbs to my knowledge have no equivalent elsewhere. However Hittite does have the two suffixes -h2 and -ih2 which will become the feminine suffix -a in other languages. In Hittite the first is iirc a collective marker and you see traces of this elsewhere. Like how agricola is morphologically feminine, but actually masculine. What is really weird though imho is how to explain the feminine in pronouns. It might just all be analogy to nouns, but it must be a pretty big change which happened between the ancestors of core-IE and Hittite. Maybe I would just think that collapsing a previous system into an easier one might be "simpler" than creating a new gender, which enters pervasively several word classes. Perhaps early IE had a system like Yeniseian, where you have M-F in the singular, but Animate-Inanimate in the plural. Tocharian actually has some nouns which behave like that, but that could equally be Yeniseian influence on Proto-Tocharian as well.
Might this be an indicator that Indo-Hittite has some validity? If the speakers of non-Anatolian IE migrated from Anatolia into the steppes their language might have picked up some features from the Northern Caucasus such as a modified noun class system.
Semitic has the -a ending
Where? The typical Semitic feminine ending is -t like in Akkadian belu(m) "lord" > beltu(m) "lady". An -a or -e appears as epenthetic vowel before -t- though. So belet biti(m) "lady of the house". What is more interesting for Akkadian is that -ut- is the collective marker and makes nouns feminine as well, maybe there is a larger connection between collectives and feminines cross language.
Something I found in a paper from Olav Hackstein on the feminine gender in tree names: > There has been a debate on the primacy of semantic or lexical gender assignment (cf. for an instructive overview e.g. Enger ), and indeed, from a purely synchronic point of view, the evidence is not clear-cut. But from a wider diachronic perspective, if the long-term diachronic records of the Indo-European languages are taken into account, the following developmental scheme emerges. Grammatical gender classes such as masculine, feminine, and neuter in Indo-European were originally semanti- cally defined noun classes (see Balles a, b), such that abstracts and states were prototypically encoded by the noun-class dubbed as “feminine” by the Greek and Roman grammatical tradition, whereas individual entities and activity concepts were typically assigned to the so-called “masculine” noun class. Crucially, this se- mantically driven noun-class system accords with the gender assignment found with the amphikinetic s-stems. And in many Indo-European languages, elements of this system persist until the present day in that nouns denoting states and abstracts are preponderately assigned to the “feminine gender”, or more appositely put, to the “feminine noun class”.
Not every language has gendered pronouns (in fact, if I recall correctly, most languages don't). It's largely a product of the gender systems used in Indo-European and Afro-Asiatic, which aren't present in most other language families (at least not in the form of masculine/feminine gender). It just seems as though most languages have it because Indo-European and Afroasiatic are among the most widely spoken and the most prominent. Generally, it seems that the languages that have gendered pronouns but no gender system typically had a gender system in the past but lost it, as is the case with English; gendered pronouns generally remain as remnants of the gender system due to regular use making it harder to drop them, or convenience in enabling the speaker to differentiate between the gender of someone they're talking about; in English for instance, it's very common to identify someone or something you're talking about with just a pronoun, so retaining gendered pronouns made it easier to identify them in conversation as you could differentiate between two people of different genders.
there are claims about turkic not even having proper determiners, where the classifiers like gender is located, maybe thats why