There seems to be something about the English language where people think gendered language relates to gender. But in other languages, a table or a bridge may have a gender. A cat may be referred to as a she, despite its physical sex or gender identity.
This.
Sometimes when people talk about using gender-neutral terms, I wonder how it would work in other languages.
As you said, for some languages there is a gender for inanimate objects.
In Arabic for example, apparently everything is either feminine or masculine. All countries are feminine, table is masculine, and chair is feminine [1], book is masculine, and car is feminine [2].
Other languages such as French, Russian, and Spanish also seems to assign genders to objects.
The Sanskrit language on the other hand seems designed with feminine, masculine, and neuter, but some objects have a non-neuter gender anyway.
Quoting from [3] (on Sanskrit):
> "Fruit" is neuter, but "tree" is masculine! "City" is neuter, but "village" is masculine! "Army" and "knowledge" are feminine, but "action" is neuter! In truth, most nouns take a certain gender by default, and we cannot guess a noun's gender just by looking at a noun's meaning.
[1] https://blogs.transparent.com/arabic/noun-gender-in-arabic/
[2] https://openbooks.lib.msu.edu/arb101/chapter/vocabulary-and-...
Those languages assign gender to words, I think, not objects. A car in German can be "der Wagen", "die Karre" or "das Auto".
There may be languages that assign genders to objects. Perhaps Dyirbal, which Lakoff refers to in "Women, fire and dangerous things"? I'm not familiar with any such language so I can't say.
Btw, of all the languages that I mentioned above, Sanskrit is the only one that I know atleast a little of. And that was because I took a Sanskrit 101 class in college many years ago.