Languages and Linguistics

the gender assignment often seems to have nothing to do with the nature of the thing. A German cat is a girl (die Katze); Norwegian and French cats (en katt, le chat) are boys. German tables are masculine (der Tisch); French tables are feminine (la table), while Norwegian tables (et bord) are neuter, as are German girls (das Mädchen). French and Spanish don't have neuter nouns. The reasons are complicated, varied, and not always understood. While it makes sense for a gendered living creature to be named with a correspondingly gendered noun, why should a table have a gender in any language? Who knows?