I have just read Cratylus from Plato (not yet in greek
) and I found very interesting the strong explanation, sometimes even sarcastic, to language.
Well, I could talk about a thousand nice things within this dialogue but now, I've realized that he never mention anything about the gender of the names.
There was a thing that catch my attention in the first pages of the Wheelock's Latin, it says: "latin, like english, has three genders..." then he explains about the grammatic gender and all that, yet... for me english doesn't have three genders in fact, because it only put a difference betwen man and woman, and things, which is imopossible to avoid in any language, but even so, the adjectives and noun's modifiers never change and indicate this difference. For me english hasn't the plenty of the gender's conception.
However many other languages have genders, specially latin, greek and their derivates. I grew up speaking latin languages, and for me it is pretty normal and even, poetic that the inanimate things have also a gender. But where this inanimate gender come from? for me it is obvious that it is a result of the mental relationship of a thing to the essence of the masculine and feminine, and inanimate which are man and woman and things, but how? which are the ways we can relate things in order to have a gender such as "masculine" and "feminine"?
You're so brave to be reading Joyce, since English is like your third or fourth language---that must be even worse than trying to read Pindar! And at the same time you're absorbing Greek and Latin! I wish I was that good at languages too. 
