I'm not sure if this belongs in this sub, but it crossed my mind and figured this sub would get better answers than the main ask sub.

I speak German and Russian. Both languages assign a gender to what an English speaker would just call an "it".

I was pondering the creation of languages, how it usually starts as nouns for identifying objects and being able to describe them. Verbs come along to explain what they do. Tense explains when things happened. And so on.

I don't understand how objects that have no gender came to have a specific gender within the language.

Is it more of the case where the languages arbitrarily split into two and when labeling the two halves, people decided to use an universally understood binary that happened to lie on either end? Or did people determine gender or nouns by thinking, for example, that chairs "are more masculine" (German) than feminine?