Gendered nouns make no sense

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How can a table, chair or any other inanimate object be masculine or feminine? They have genitalia or chromosomes or hormones etc. so whay are they masculine or feminine in other languages? It makes no sense.

That never made any sense to me, either. Heck, I sometimes refer to individual people or pets as "it," even when I know what sort of physiological pluming "it" may have.

I know, it's crazy. Sometimes in foreign languages a verb is changed if you are a boy or a girl, which I think it stupid cos how is your gender relevant to "I went to the park"?

I'm glad there's none of that in English!

Well, the issue is that grammatical gender isn't necessarily related to the concept of "sex" which has become associated with it. I like wikipedia's illustration:

Although since some languages lack neuter genders, it really is necessary to assign either masuline or feminine to something. PIE had a neuter gender, as did Latin, so to some degree I would imagine (though have not studied) that what we have now in the Romance languages is what happens when you gut one of the genders.

What was the original point of assigning a gender to objects? Was there an assumption that certain things were more feminine and others masculine.

I understand it's different from sex... but really want's the point? Just seems like extra rules for the sake of rules... and I hate that.

Sometimes gender is assigned even in English, but that is old practice used in special areas like ocean travel. I suppose gender might be assigned as a form of endearment for an inanimate object of importance on which people's lives depend, such as a ship.

Many nouns were assumed to be used by male or female.

A countertop would be feminine, a table masculine.
A brush is feminine, a comb is masculine.
A curl is feminine, a lock is masculine.
A needle is feminine, a hammer is masculine.

These change according to how things are used, save for any language that has an official school that is taught, which they then use an arbitrary time period to define which is masculine and feminine.

I suppose that the most common use of the masculine and feminine forms of words in languages is for differentiating between the associated sex, but it also differentiates between non-gender differences in meaning.

For example, in Spanish, "The Right".
IIRC,
El Derecho means "not The Wrong", and La Derecha means "not The Left".

Grammatical genders are just arbitrarily-defined categories. They primarily provide a basis for different parts of speech (say adjective and noun) to agree in form to clarify their relationship. In Indo-European languages they tend to have a casual association with anatomical gender, but this is not absolute and doesn't hold true for all languages. For example, Swahili has 16 different noun classes associated with categories like animate nouns, plants, and others that are hard to classify. In either situation the system is not entirely consistent, but the small number of genders in European languages means that things get pigeonholed in categories that are much more vague. And a lack of gender just means you have to rely on syntax or something else to take up its clarifying function.

I seem to recall that this is the case, though I don't know anything about the process.

No, derecho is in right as in, "you have the right to". Right meaning not wrong would be "correcto".

Also, derecho can be an adjective meaning "straight/not curved."

Attempts to apply logic to language structure are futile. Much of language is merely traditional and the traditions which formed the structure has long disappeared. But you can't change it so learn to live with it. In Finnish, for example, the word for "he" and "she" is "hän" which does not depict gender and might cause some problems but nothing monumental. You can tell the difference by context. Just as mysteriously the Finnish for "lend" and "borrow" are the same. People manage.

and derecho also means law...

and la derecha is also used for right winged parties


BTW I hate that english doesn't have male and female, for example:
two boys and two girls are walking, and they see a friend. In spanish one of the boys can very easily say "let me introduce you to my female friends", of course in spanish it's shorter, but you get the idea.

whoa!

As I recall, doesn't Mandarin lack gender, number, declension, and conjugation? Now that's how you run a language!

Algic, Aleut-Inuit and Na-Dene languages also lack those.