@ink_slinger @bgcarlisle As I understand it Indo-European originally had two genders, one for words refererring to animate things and another for inanimate. Those were the roots of the masculine and neuter genders, feminine came later.
https://allegatifac.unipv.it/silvialuraghi/Gender%20FoL.pdf
The neuter #gender was dropped from many of the languages that evolved out of Indo-European. English has largely lost even femine/masculine distinctions.