Why are Romance languages like Spanish are so weird?

Why do Romance languages like Spanish label everything based on masculinity and femininity especially the objects and things. For example, libro (book), perro (dog) is masculine and thus require adding the musculine word "el" before the noun where computadora, rata (rat) is femine and thus require femine "la" before the noun.

This does NOT make any sense to me. How could a objects or things have masculinity and femininity? How do they decide what is masculine and what is femine? Why do most nouns end with 'o' or 'a'; this limits word diversity noun could have.

English is my second langauge. I do not know much about Romance languages. I was studing Spanish and I thought it was so weird.

Grammatical genders is not a weird feature, it's common in most of languages and this is also true for the Germanic branch. For example German not only has masculine and feminine words but neuter ones, like Latin had. It's English the odd ball because lacks genders whereas German, Spanish, French, Italian, Dutch etc. have. You say that English is not your mother tongue, so I must deduce that it's another one that lacks geners, what is it? Because there are very few.

>>another one that lacks geners, what is it?<<

-- Hungarian or Finnish?
Or some Asian language?

Grammatical genders make words sexy :-)

Turkish, Armenian the Caucasian ones, Basque, Estonian etc

I've forgotten Chinese, Japanese Korean :-)

<<<<Grammatical genders is not a weird feature, it's common in most of languages and this is also true for the Germanic branch. For example German not only has masculine and feminine words but neuter ones, like Latin had. It's English the odd ball because lacks genders whereas German, Spanish, French, Italian, Dutch etc. have. You say that English is not your mother tongue, so I must deduce that it's another one that lacks geners, what is it? Because there are very few. >>>>>

I highly doubt that most languages have gender nouns. The only languages I believe that has gender nouns are indo-European languages and even in indo-European languages there are branches like indo-Aryan that do not have gender nouns. My language is Bengali by the way and we do not have gender nouns.

My question is how do they decide what is masculine and what is femine?
How can dogs (perro) be more masculine than rats (rata)? It does not make any sense to me.

It has nothing to do with masculinity or femininity (or neutrality for that matter), you just have to accept this weird fact.

Take a loot at a webpage that shows the languages with geners and the genderless ones on a map, I can't remember it, but If I'm not mistaken genersless languages were minority

It gets even weirder. Same word gets different gender in different IE languages. LOL!

El libro (m)
Das Buch (n)
Knjiga (f)

It's not just Spanish or even the Romance languages in general. A lot of European languages have this feature. Russian and German are good examples.

It's just a different feature one has to get used to if trying to learn Spanish. Once you get into the hang of it, it's not so bad.

Hittite didn't make a different in gender, but in animate and inanimate nouns.

Polish has 5 'genders': masuline animate, masculine inanimate, feminine animate, feminine inanimate and neuter.

Semitic languages do have the gender

PARISIEN Sat Apr 18, 2009 3:30 pm GMT
>>another one that lacks geners, what is it?<<

-- Hungarian or Finnish?
Or some Asian language?

Grammatical genders make words sexy :-)
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Latin also lacks genders - where do the Romance genders come from?

Latin also lacks genders - where do the Romance genders come from?

Are you kidding?? I hope so

Latin has three genders: masculine, feminine and neuter

By the way, I found an interesting paper about gender in Indo-European languages. It follows a prediction made by Boroditsky & Schmidt that «speakers of English who had no prior exposure to foreign languages, when asked to assign a masculine or feminine gender to nouns (...) should agree (..) among themselves».
And the paper found that yes, they agree «quite well among themselves»

Admitedly, this was not the main point of the paper, which was that «although monolingual native speakers of English (American college students) agree quite well among themselves in the way they assign masculinity or femininity to nouns (objects, abstract ideas, animals, etc.), they disagree with just about every other speaker of Indo-European languages in the world».

But still, that's interesting to note an agreement in something that is completely subjective --and that I'd expect to be personal-- among people of the same culture.

Link: http://www.foundalis.com/res/gender_evolution.html