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Most Indo-European languages have Grammatical gender with two classes or three classes, i. e. masculine vs. feminine or masculine vs. feminine vs. neuter. Every noun must belong to one of these classes, and Grammatical gender requires an agreement between noun and its modifiers like demonstrative, article, adjective etc.
The existing theories on the principle for Gender assignment are largely divided into ‘Meaning-based Gender assignment' and ‘Form-based Gender assignment'.
But Gender assignment seems often to be so arbitrary, even erratic, and it is, in fact, a very complicated problem related to various factors like meaning of noun, word-formation, declension classes and convention of speakers etc.
This article deals with the principle for Gender assignment in Gothic, one of the oldest Germanic languages, and shows and researches some anomalies like double gender assignment, synonyms with different genders and disagreement between form and gender. It can inform us of the general principle for Gender assignment in old Indo-European as well as old Germanic languages, and provide us with concrete understanding of the Gender system in Indo-European languages.