one might speculate that “more classes to reduce collisions” could be part of the historical explanation for grammatical gender
Linguists are actually quite certain that this is the case. There are many languages that have more than two noun classes though, using other features or arbitrary classification that simply needs to be memorized. One common division is also animate/inanimate, and obviously for that (and many other divides), all people are in one category.
I’d be curious to hear about more of those classes—speaking as someone who only knows English and one year’s worth of French, and doesn’t know anything not stated in the OP. So English has pronouns that distinguish gender, something like personhood (“it” vs “he/she”), and plurality; then there are gendered nouns in French and probably other Romance languages; also there’s the pronoun formality of “tu” vs “usted” in Spanish described here, and “tu” vs “vous” in French. I’ve also heard that Japanese has formality/deference built in, possibly more deeply than just pronouns (? I have no idea). Lastly, I once heard there was some language in which you had to know which way was north to speak grammatically...
miscellaneous (includes things not classifiable in the first three)
Also:
The Ngangikurrunggurr language has noun classes reserved for canines and hunting weapons. The Anindilyakwa language has a noun class for things that reflect light. The Diyari language distinguishes only between female and other objects. Perhaps the most noun classes in any Australian language are found in Yanyuwa, which has 16 noun classes, including nouns associated with food, trees and abstractions, in addition to separate classes for men and masculine things, women and feminine things. In the men’s dialect, the classes for men and for masculine things have simplified to a single class, marked the same way as the women’s dialect marker reserved exclusively for men.
Japanese has formality as verb conjugations—http://www.japaneseverbconjugator.com/VerbDetails.asp?txtVerb=%E8%A1%8C%E3%81%8F—iku 行く as “will go (plain)” and ikimasu 行きます as “will go (polite)”. Translators try to preserve this, but I personally find translating that to be kinda hard. “I’ll go” and “I will go” is the best I can do off the top of my head (watashi wa iku/watashi wa ikimasu—and as a more realistic example, kaisha ni iku/kaisha ni ikimasu—I’ll go to the office/I will go to the office—“watashi/I” being left out because Japanese is contextual).
Linguists are actually quite certain that this is the case. There are many languages that have more than two noun classes though, using other features or arbitrary classification that simply needs to be memorized. One common division is also animate/inanimate, and obviously for that (and many other divides), all people are in one category.
I’d be curious to hear about more of those classes—speaking as someone who only knows English and one year’s worth of French, and doesn’t know anything not stated in the OP. So English has pronouns that distinguish gender, something like personhood (“it” vs “he/she”), and plurality; then there are gendered nouns in French and probably other Romance languages; also there’s the pronoun formality of “tu” vs “usted” in Spanish described here, and “tu” vs “vous” in French. I’ve also heard that Japanese has formality/deference built in, possibly more deeply than just pronouns (? I have no idea). Lastly, I once heard there was some language in which you had to know which way was north to speak grammatically...
Hmm, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noun_class has some info. Heh:
Also:
Fascinating.
Japanese has formality as verb conjugations—http://www.japaneseverbconjugator.com/VerbDetails.asp?txtVerb=%E8%A1%8C%E3%81%8F—iku 行く as “will go (plain)” and ikimasu 行きます as “will go (polite)”. Translators try to preserve this, but I personally find translating that to be kinda hard. “I’ll go” and “I will go” is the best I can do off the top of my head (watashi wa iku/watashi wa ikimasu—and as a more realistic example, kaisha ni iku/kaisha ni ikimasu—I’ll go to the office/I will go to the office—“watashi/I” being left out because Japanese is contextual).