@Cerberus What is the function of grammatical gender?

@TRiG Good evening!

If you have gender, it's easier to refer to antecedents.

> The cat and the dog fought, but it is unhurt.

If cat were feminine and dog masculine, you could use he or she instead of it to unambiguously refer to one or the other.

How are things?

@Cerberus I can see that. Even better in a signed language, of course, with an arbitrary number of gender-neutral pronouns.

@TRiG I'm not sure what you mean here.

I don't know any sign languages, alas.

And what do you mean by "an arbitrary number of gender-neutral pronouns"?

@Cerberus Points at a point in space That's a pronoun. Points at another That's another pronoun. Well, kind of. Most (all?) signed languages have the concept of "placement": You can "put" a person, object, concept, whatever in a particular locus and refer back to it by simply pointing. There is no theoretical upper bound to the number of loci you can so define.