I speak Russian, which is gendered (masculine/feminine/neuter) as my native language.
> what utility do you think a language gains from gendered nouns?
None whatsoever. When speaking of things that don't have any meaningful gender, it makes things unnecessarily complicated. When speaking of things that do have physical gender, it often forces you to make assumptions about it even when it's completely irrelevant.
> ow do you know what gender a noun is? I assume there are "themes" that might inform you. But if you're unclear, how do you do find out?
In Russian, it mostly follows the spelling of the words - i.e. if a word ends with a certain vowel, it's feminine, except if ... etc.
Sometimes it doesn't work that way, mostly with loanwords. Some loanwords so obviously don't match any "genderizing" pattern, that they basically end up with neuter by default.
In other cases the historical form of the word did match a pattern, and was assigned a gender accordingly - and then changed (e.g. by re-loaning it in a more accurate spelling), and no longer fits. When that happens, people will use the more "appropriate" rather than the "right" gender in colloquial speech, and eventually it becomes the new standard, collecting the mismatch.
A good example of this is the Russian word "coffee". When it was first loaned back in 18th century, it was "kofiy" - and in Russian, that is definitely masculine. Eventually it got re-loaned as "kofe", which would normally be neuter; but the masculine gender assignment stayed from past spelling. In the dictionaries, that is - in practice treating the word as neuter became one of the common incorrect colloquialisms, just because it doesn't "look" masculine. Language purists fought this for several decades, and eventually lost: it's still nominally masculine, but neuter is considered an "accepted variant" in modern dictionaries.
> how are new genders decided? I'm struggling to think of an example as "laptop" presumably has the same gender as "computer", but it must come up sometime
For new words, by their spelling, as described above. So "laptop" is masculine because it ends with a consonant, for example.
Personal names are an exception to this stuff. As in, when a foreign name is used in a context where gender cannot be guessed, people will often apply the usual rules (and then often get it wrong). But once context is established, it's properly accounted for.
On the other hand, for place names, gender is automatically assigned by the usual rules. So to a Russian speaker, New York and Texas are masculine, while California and Florida are feminine.
My understanding is that proto-IndioEuropean had two genders: animate and inanimate which would have served a purpose. Later animate split into masculine/feminine. Some languages preserved all three, others dropped the inanimate (or it morphed into "neuter").
Over the last 20 years or so, the consensus has grown in Indo-European linguistics that Proto-Indo-European had only the animate/inanimate distinction mentioned above. After the Anatolian branch and possibly Tocharian split off from the other Indo-European languages, the remaining core of IE languages developed the three genders masculine, feminine, and neuter.
The idea that Lithuanian is extremely conservative from a PIE perspective is rather outdated. Lithuanian does preserve a number of features of what might be termed “Proto-Nuclear-Indo-European” (to use the terminology of Lundvist & Yates), but the insights from the Anatolian languages show that not all of these features can be reconstructed back to Proto-Indo-European itself.
What is interesting, neither Lithuanian, nor Latvian has neuter gender. While slavic languages, like Russian or Polish, do have. To be fair, old Prussian seem to have had neuter gender. But given Germanic influence, they likely adapted in later days. It'd be weird if IE had developed 3rd gender, then Baltic languages dropped it while other languages around them did keep it.
Got any links or literature on how that evolved according to the new school?
It isn't at all strange that the East Baltic languages developed (along with other PNIE languages) the neuter and then dropped it later. The very same happened in Albanian, Irish, and the Romance languages (except for Balkan Romance).
Any recent introduction to IE linguistics starting from Beekes' Comparative Indo-European Linguistics will discuss the neuter being an innovation after the Anatolian languages broke off. However, I would especially recommend the Handbook of Comparative and Historical Indo-European Linguistics that will be published by Mouton de Gruyter this September, as it will contain a state-of-the-art survey of the field by a number of prominent scholars. See Lundvist & Yates' chapter on Morphology in it (you can also download a preprint PDF of this chapter from Yates' papers on Academia.edu if you have an account there).
If the neutral gender was dropped, I'd expect to be at least some leftovers... Anyway, I'll try to get hold of that book once it's out. Looks like it'd be interesting read.
> what utility do you think a language gains from gendered nouns?
None whatsoever. When speaking of things that don't have any meaningful gender, it makes things unnecessarily complicated. When speaking of things that do have physical gender, it often forces you to make assumptions about it even when it's completely irrelevant.
> ow do you know what gender a noun is? I assume there are "themes" that might inform you. But if you're unclear, how do you do find out?
In Russian, it mostly follows the spelling of the words - i.e. if a word ends with a certain vowel, it's feminine, except if ... etc.
Sometimes it doesn't work that way, mostly with loanwords. Some loanwords so obviously don't match any "genderizing" pattern, that they basically end up with neuter by default.
In other cases the historical form of the word did match a pattern, and was assigned a gender accordingly - and then changed (e.g. by re-loaning it in a more accurate spelling), and no longer fits. When that happens, people will use the more "appropriate" rather than the "right" gender in colloquial speech, and eventually it becomes the new standard, collecting the mismatch.
A good example of this is the Russian word "coffee". When it was first loaned back in 18th century, it was "kofiy" - and in Russian, that is definitely masculine. Eventually it got re-loaned as "kofe", which would normally be neuter; but the masculine gender assignment stayed from past spelling. In the dictionaries, that is - in practice treating the word as neuter became one of the common incorrect colloquialisms, just because it doesn't "look" masculine. Language purists fought this for several decades, and eventually lost: it's still nominally masculine, but neuter is considered an "accepted variant" in modern dictionaries.
> how are new genders decided? I'm struggling to think of an example as "laptop" presumably has the same gender as "computer", but it must come up sometime
For new words, by their spelling, as described above. So "laptop" is masculine because it ends with a consonant, for example.
Personal names are an exception to this stuff. As in, when a foreign name is used in a context where gender cannot be guessed, people will often apply the usual rules (and then often get it wrong). But once context is established, it's properly accounted for.
On the other hand, for place names, gender is automatically assigned by the usual rules. So to a Russian speaker, New York and Texas are masculine, while California and Florida are feminine.