Slightly off topic (not about grammatical genus, but about German's case system): I often compare German's case system to a type system in a programming language: the verb expects the sentence's object in the suitable case. If you use a wrong type, it gives a compile error. In most cases, the case (type) that you have to use makes sense, but there are rare cases where you simply have to learn the case. The latter is like having to use a (programming) library that was designed by some other programmer with an interface that you would design differently.
Just like you have to write a computer program that gives no compile error (e.g. because of typing), in German, you also have to formulate your sentences in a way that gives no compile error to its case (type) system.
The first thing you learn is that three genders are indicated in the nominative case using der (masculine) / die (feminine) / das (neuter).
So you see "der" in a sentence and that thing must be masculine, right? Nope, because "der" is feminine in the dative case.
The gender system in German wouldn't be such garbage if the articles weren't overloaded. Imagine if in your type system "float" could mean two different types, and you needed more information to figure out which type it is (like, for example, memorizing the type of the object its referring to). It breaks the idea of locality.
I personally would never teach it that way. To me the four cases are like different faces of, say, a cube (I know a cube has six faces - sorry), where the cube represents the noun. Just like looking at a cube from different perspectives (in the direction of some face) gives you a different view on it, each case gives a different "perspective" of a way that the word relates to some different clause in a sentence.
How the articles and endings "rotate" when the case changes ("as the cube rotates") is something that I developed a really smart scheme for (which can be found in no book on German grammar that I am aware of) that every "mathematical-minded person" immediatelly grasped, told me it perfectly made sense and wished that someone had taught it this way in school. On the other hand, nearly every "humanities-minded person" told me that they cannot understand what I am even talking about and what advantage this perspective is supposed to have.
Typical language teachers are "humanities-minded". :-(
Unluckily, I have far too less time to write this all down in sufficient detail that other people can learn from it; I have far too many other things to do. :-(
> Imagine if in your type system "float" could mean two different types, and you needed more information to figure out which type it is (like, for example, memorizing the type of the object its referring to).
You are describing declarations and definitions in C++ and the problems of parsing C++? ;-)
I have known plenty of German speakers, including natives and often myself, who make case/gender mistakes with no real impact on comprehension.
There certainly can be some ambiguity, but context and word order can often mitigate that, no? I feel like if you used "die" for everything and just a neuter nominative case, I could still figure most things out. My experience is that many German speakers (especially when speaking a dialect) just mush articles and suffixes together and it's not entirely clear that they use specific genders and cases most of the time anyway. For example, my relatives near Frankfurt pretty much say "d- Milch", "d- Hund", "d- Mauer", etc. SOMETIMES, you can hear a bit of an "s" when it's supposed to be das, des. YMMV of course.
I don't really find German to be less forgiving of mistakes than English or the handful of other languages I've studied.
At least, this what I take away from your comment about compile errors. Maybe -Wcase or -Wgender is a closer analogy?
Anyway, I like your analogy overall. :)
Languages are tightly inherited, even more so than genes. How languages are structured varies highly. Some have gender-like tenses for the cardinal directions, where things are not feminine but 'northy'. Some have no genders, but do have time-like tenses, where things are 'future-y' or 'present-y'. Just look at sign-language, with it's use of height similar to an exclamation point in English at times. Human communication is weird.
Even in English, our sense of gender has changed over time. It used to be that we cared more about the number of items/people over their gender, but now we care about the gender. IE: Thee/Thou/You/ became Him/Her/You.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_in_English
English is, herself, a pidgin language. The irregularity of the verbs and the reliance on context make it very accommodating to new terms and nouns, but VERY difficult to learn fluently. It is standardizing though, the Afro/Urban-American vernacular use of 'be' is a perfect example (I be going to the store, not, I am going to the store). This change of 'be' is very similar to the romance languages. English is very slowly being wrenched into standardization. It will be very interesting to see how Chinese and Computer Programming languages affect English.
The Story of English is a great look into this language and it's story:
For example you can select a gender pronoun in English to match your gender. https://uwm.edu/lgbtrc/support/gender-pronouns/
In Hungarian we just say "Ő" to refer to someone, privacy is baked into the language :)
It doesn't really make sense to anthropomorphise things once you're an adult, but I bet everyone can remember trying to figure out the world as a kid and just assuming things are of similar nature as people.
I think that even languages which currently don't have gender forms of words, like English, still have the concept psychologically firmly embedded in the culture. The generic "cat" is more female than male. The "tom-cat" is only male. A "rock", I'll bet, is also subconsciously male, and a "river" more female than male. It's all there, even if not explicit in language. OTOH, it's not really universal, different languages assign gender pretty much randomly - but they do assign it.
Social determinism and radical neutrality go against the grain of this "making sense of the world" phase of development, and probably don't result in a practical world-view.
Similar to effects of (past) umlauts in English or the a/an difference.
"Tommy, Frank, and Susan burned their homework and fed it to the dog."
"Who fed it to the dog?"
"That person."
Our languages keep having gender, so it's clearly been advantageous from an evolutionary perspective. The problem is when we let gender become more important than the data it's trying to express, like when a society lets gender dictate your social class. That shit needs to stop.
In German, words like "library" (Bibliothek) and "street" (Strasse/Straße) are feminine, for example. It's true that some feminine words, such as "woman" (Frau) and "mother" (Mutter), are feminine. But then you have words like "girl" (Mädchen), which are not.
Your example ("she did") could actually have ambiguity in languages that extends the noun gender to pronouns, such as French. "She" doesn't need to refer to a woman, just a feminine noun. For example, "car" (voiture) is feminine, and you can refer to "it" as "elle" (she).