Polish has some of those problems too, at least the ones with conjugations. The words mom (appearing in your contact list), mom (as in call mom) and mom (as in send money to mom) are different. That applies to proper names too, and it isn't regular. It's not easy to figure oujt who the user refers to if you just have the contacts list and the command. Polish had problems way before nlp, for example "Annie has sent yo…
Croatian is the same. Noun declination makes some sense, as it sometimes allows you to omit prepositions (although I sure am glad English doesn't do that). But gendered verbs are just stupid.
What's odd in Croatian is that the all the verbs behave as intransitive Italian verbs, reflecting the gender of the speaker: "I fell" -> "pao sam" or "pala sam" but also "pojeo sam jabuku" vs "pojela sam jabuku" if the speaker is a woman.
I'm not a linguist, but as a native speaker of both, I always thought it had something to do with the fact that in Croatian the verb "to be" is the only auxiliary verb used to built past tenses while in Italian transitive verbs use the verb "to have".
The past participles in many languages behave very similarly to adjectives and thus I thought it might not be surprising that you'd decline them according to number and gender as you'd do with any adjective.
So if when you fall you "are fallen", you decline the "fallen" participle/adjective according to the subject, namely you in this case.
Thus instead of "have eaten" Croatian says "am eaten" (not meaning the passive voice but just using the verb to be as axillary instead of have) as a consequence you notice the "gendered verbs" more often than in other languages.
As to why Italian declines participles when clitics are involved, I assume it adds some redundancy so you can more easily guess what the clitic refers to.