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Interesting rationalisation for gendered inanimate nouns in romance languages, thanks. Also used in many/most other Germanic (and other language families?) right? Is your explanation a personal inspiration or established theory? For it to make sense they would need to (for example) refer to (say) a table as 'he' later in a sentence. Do they do that?

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IMO grammatical gender in Indo European languages (of which the Germanic and Romance language families are a part of) reflect how nouns and their references (pronouns, adjectives etc) are semantically linked by modifying the word endings of the latter to better reflect those of the original noun - I like to think of it as the equivalent of type suffixes in assembly language.

Definitely not a personal inspiration, but I can't recall where I first heard the idea.

> For it to make sense they would need to (for example) refer to (say) a table as 'he' later in a sentence. Do they do that?

I don't speak any Romance languages beyond high school Spanish, but I assume that's the case.

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