English does not have grammatical gender. Unlike German with three grammatical genders and Dutch with two, English has none. However, this was not always the case.
Grammatical gender in English existed until the thirteenth century. Old English had a system of grammatical gender similar to that of German with three genders: masculine, feminine and neuter. Nouns followed different declension patterns depending on their gender, and determiners and attributive adjectives showed gender inflection in agreement with the noun they modified.
The article the had three forms in the nominative. They were the masculine sé, feminine séo and neuter þæt. The letter þ represented the voiceless interdental fricative and is used in Icelandic.
Grammatical gender was used in Old English. In the 1200's, however, it was lost. English used to have three grammatical genders, masculine, feminine and neutral, the same as in German and Icelandic. The loss of grammatical gender in English can be viewed as a form of simplification.
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