system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
[Linguistics] Why is it English doesn't have gendered nouns and articles while many other languages in the area do?
gpt
The whole story is long and a bit complicated, but here's a short version: English had a gender/case system very much like the other Germanic languages, but a few shifts in pronunciation led to the endings loosing their use, so the system was dropped altogether (except in pronouns). 

The most important shift was that various vowel endings which indicated case/number in adjectives and nouns were obscured to a single sound, the "indeterminate vowel", which was often written as an "e". A number of endings like -a, -u, -e, -an, -um were all reduced to -e and whatever grammatical distinctions they carried before were lost. Around the same time -m endings were changed to -n endings and then eventually the -n was dropped altogether. This all started around the year 1000. So, putting these two things together a weak adjective which was *blinda* in the singular and *blindan* in the plural changed to *blinde* in both cases. Similar developments occurred with nouns and even verbs.

One result of the elimination of case/gender is that English is much less flexible with word order than some of the other Germanic languages. Since there's no dative/accusative/nominative anymore, we need to structure our sentences in the standard SVO (subject, verb, object) model most of the time. We can get around this with some prepositions sometimes, but it can still sound awkward. For example, "Bill threw Sara the ball," is ok as is, "Bill threw the ball to Sara," but, "To Sara Bill threw the ball," sounds strange. 

If you want a nice and detailed book on all this, check out "A History of the English Language" by Albert Baugh and Thomas Cable.