>>513110040
>>513110431
I'm a beginner Latin learner, but I reckon "gender" is actually helpful. First of all it doesn't really have anything to do with male and female, that's just terminology, it's more kind of like you have color coding. Why is it useful? Because within a sentence you want to know which other word a word is related to/connected to/referring to. One way to achieve that is by "coding" words in so-called gender. If "fast" is referring to "car" and "car" is "masculine" then the word "fast" is with a different ending than if it were referring to a "feminine" word. So it's like you have three crayons with you at all times, coloring all words with these three colors. Then when you see a word you don't have to guess which other word it's talking about, you know "oh this word is green, so it must be related to this other green word, not this red word over in this part of the sentence". Three colors means less ambiguity than one color. Swedish has two "genders" but we don't even think of them as masculine and feminine, just t-words and n-words. I don't really see how they are useful in Swedish though because Swedish like English is almost completely devoid of declensions. I will have to think about it. Off the top of my head I can't think of any major benefit of the "genders" in Swedish.
Look at picrel. Genders, as well as all other declensions, ie the different word forms that are in the OP pic, help minimize syntactic ambiguity, syntactic ambiguity is a problem in English.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syntactic_ambiguity
Another example sentence is:
>They had living quarters for workers in the refinery.
This is syntactically ambiguous, just as the sentence in picrel. It can mean either that the living quarters were located in the refinery, and were for workers (not necessarily the workers of the refinery), or that the living quarters were for the people who work in the refinery (but may or may not be located in the refinery).
