@Thaminga I would ask how the hell any of that is practical... but then it would put me in the very uncomfortable position of having to defend English. No way.

@Thaminga And then there's Dyirbal...

@zebratron2084 That's actually a common phenomenon in African languages, too (more or less the entire Bantu group has something along these lines).

I'd guess because having this many noun classes makes it easy to craft new words by clipping the noun class marker off of a previous root and smashing it into another one along with giving you a vague idea of what overall category a word fits into if you don't already know it (where European/Semitic-style grammatical gender is semantically pretty much useless), but still.

@zebratron2084 (well, I say European/Semitic, but honestly pretty much the entire Indo-European and Afro-Asiatic language families currently have, or at some point had that kind of setup going on)