Spanish, French, German, and numerous other European languages have gendered nouns, i.e. der Mann/die Frau (the man/the woman). Such distinctions don't exist in English. Where did gendered nouns originally come from, and how are they related to languages without them?
hi! While there are some historians of linguistics here, this question might do better in a linguists sub like /r/asklinguistics or /r/linguistics (in their stickied Q&A thread). In fact, /r/linguistics already has a related section in their FAQ
So, the thing with gendered nouns is that gender (at least of words that refer to inanimate objects) is something that's derived from the structure of a given word. That is to say, it's not entirely arbitrary that the Russian word for 'sun' is neuter while the word for 'moon' is feminine. The word solnce is neuter because it ends in -e, and has a particular pattern of endings in its various case-forms. Likewise, the word luna is feminine because it ends in -a, and has a particular pattern of endings in its various case-forms. Now, then, the question becomes: why do Russian nouns have these networks of case endings that are associated with genders for a whole host of non-human/inanimate words?
Well, this feature traces back, more or less, to a form of Proto-Indo-European (the reconstructed ancestor of English, Spanish, French, German, Russian, Persian, Urdu, Hindi, and, according to Ethnologue, over 6% of the world's languages). Grammatical gender isn't quite ancestral to the entire family. It seems that the earliest system of PIE that we can reconstruct had a two-way distinction, between animate things on the one hand (including humans and animals, basically) and inanimate things on the other (everything else). After Hittite broke off from the central area of PIE speakers, that center split the animate gender into masculine and feminine, and as time went on, words in various languages were reclassed, restructured, and had their meanings established, so the logic of the system became somewhat obscured. This is further complicated by the fact that some languages have secondarily lost the neuter gender (including French and Spanish), while others have lost the distinction between masculine and feminine (e.g. Danish and Swedish), and others have lost grammatical gender entirely (English).