Just for information, Malay also
has no gender distinction, neither in pronouns or noun forms. There are of
course words for "mother", "woman", "girl", otherwise one has to use the
adjectives for "male" and "female" .
On the other hand, Arabic
has gender distinction between masculine and feminine right across the
board.
Apart from a few nouns that are
feminine by usage, feminine nouns are generally marked by a special ending /-ah/
or in its full classical form /-atun/. There is strict agreement with
adjectives and verbs. There are pronouns for 3rd person feminine singular and
plural, and 2nd person singular and plural. In the classical language there
are verbal forms for 2nd and 3rd persons feminine singular, plural and
dual.
Also, all inanimate plural nouns
are considered feminine singular for the purposes of adjectival/verbal
agreement.
As regards the IE feminine, I
read somewhere that the -H (laryngeal) ending originally denoted a collective,
the idea being that it was connected with femininity through herd animals (cows,
goats etc.) being females. Perhaps also IE families were polygamous. So that men
such as sailors (nauta) or farmers (agricola) were seen as a collective
(team?).
Regards
Dennis