I think all the focus on PIE derivatives is boring and we should get Europeans some better languages without pointless features like noun genders.
There are a lot different classifier systems in language around the world; gender is just a small example.
All these mechanisms are kinds of ECC.
Granted they don't have much of a point in written word, at least not today when writing is easy to preserve digitally without accumulating errors over time. (No smudges making it hard to make out a word)
I really do wonder though how English seemingly uniquely in I-E languages ended up dropping those features, for the most part.
Not uniquely. Just within the Germanic languages, Afrikaans, an offshoot of Dutch, is without gender, in a way similar to English.
And there are others in the IE family that have lost gender. Persian is a notable example.
English lost its noun gender right after the Norman conquest. The language underwent rapid and extensive change, different populations merged, dialects flattened, and a lot of vocabulary was borrowed from the new French overlords. Many language structures, other than gender, were also lost at that time. Some have argued English almost underwent a sort of creole effect, where the native grammar of the parent languages is lost, and the next generation invent a new heavily regularized grammar to fill the void. That's going a bit far, I think, still there was a great deal of simplification. The lack of gender in Persian and Afrikaans has a somewhat similar history, in terms of social upheaval/displacement/dialect flattening, having an influence on the loss of gender.
Though it's gradually being watered down. Eg. in Norwegian Bokmål (there are two official variants of Norwegian, Bokmål is the dominant one) you can now mostly choose whether to use feminine or masculine forms for a noun if a word takes either (but you can't do this for neuter), e.g. en sol (masculine; a sun) vs. ei sol (feminine; a sun) are both valid as long as you're consistent (combining "en sol" (m; a sun) with "sola" (f; the sun) in the same text, mixing genders, is frowned upon, though some of us do that intentionally - "solen" (m; the sun) sounds to stuffy/posh to me, but I prefer "en sol" to "ei sol").
I'd welcome a more authoritarian approach here: globally adopt a new pronoun, go through a transitional period, and then we're all on the same page. Some sci-fi novels have toyed with this concept.
IMO gendered pronouns don't add much value in many languages (with exceptions - poetry etc.). In Slavic languages, it's relatively straightforward to deduce gender from the pronoun, but in Germanic and Romance languages, it's more obfuscated.
It would be nice to have a language with sensible spelling/pronunciation but no gender.
Whose dialect are you going to choose to render phonetically? Mine from the West Country, or that of my friends from Newcastle?
Will you standardise on short a in castle (Newcastle upon Tyne, North East England) or long a in castle (Restormel Castle, Cornwall)?
Or should each person just write phonetically so that we have millions of idiolects?
Also, in English there's so much detachment from spelling to pronunciation than even choosing to write it down like a random[1] dialect would be an improvement: the problem with English isn't so much about “long a” vs “short a”, it's about “through tough thorough thought, though”.
[0]: sure there's still some pronunciation differences between parts of France, but not much. And it has very little consequence on the spelling/pronunciation relationship.
[1]: in practice, it could be the most commonly spoken dialect, or the dialect that has the most pronunciation in common with others).
See parisians thinking they're better than anyone else, non-french and other-french included.
Im guessing london didn't implement this method because it's useful for them to keep differentiating themselves from the masses now that everyone can have education
Or freeze it once and for all as the French have chosen to do?
Dutch seems to be quite the opposite: spelling changes a lot. The best way to read old Dutch texts is to sound them out in your head, because the words look totally different, but they sound the same. Hearing medieval Dutch is probably easier than medieval English, but medieval English is much easier to read.
Probably because they go off to colonize very far away places and then develop separately.
Isn't Afrikaans pronunciation shifted Dutch?
I've got the feeling that most of the shifts in English don't come from the colonies, though, but more from mainland Britain. Various city accents rising in popularity and spreading their quirks around the country, like the recent i -> oi shift.
Also, I heard recently that American is actually closer to how English used to be in the 17th-18th century than UK English, which has had more development, including color -> colour and that sort of stuff.
I get the impression that this is impossible in the long term because pronunciation tends to drift, but spelling is more rigid, so over time they mismatch.
And spelling is only more rigid in English. Plenty of languages update their spelling over time. Only in English this is useless because there is already barely any connection between spelling and pronunciation, so the break would be far bigger than in other languages.
I don't know about Polish, but I have had conversations where native speakers think that until exceptions are pointed out, because they are unaware.
There's also the issue of accents, where we expect spelling to be universal across the language, but pronunciation in some accents have drifted (ie. it's not a straightforward mapping).
Anyway, writing the sound just helps the beginning reader. When you read flowing text you don’t actually read the words aloud in your head, letter by letter.
If it makes you feel better, the use of “you” as both singular and plural pronouns did not become universal until the 60s (thanks to TV amd some school rules); thee and thou remained common in northern regions of England, particularly around Yorkshire, into the 1940s. Yet you use it today without thinking about it.
And I notice the singular “they” in Jane Austin; likely it well precedes her usage as well.
It's in Shakespeare.
(If you go back to Chaucer, "girl" is gender neutral for a child.)