(no subject)

> Hello, > I know it's a little late to answer to this, but I just reread your > message and somehow stumbled over this: > >and when the feminine did appear, it was clearly the

(morphologically)

> marked counterpart of the masculine gender. Still, to take this as > evidence of PIE discrimination against women would probably be

unfair.<

> I wasn't taking this as discrimination (I'm not very traditionally > 'feminist' at all, I love males!), I was just wondering how this might > have come about. Why give a thing a gender if there is no > linguistic/social/ political(?) need?

Once (non-Anatolian) IE started making animate nouns in -a as well as -o, the obviously useful lexical tool of being able to make any noun feminine by changing the ending must have occurred to them quite early. At least, this is how I was told it most likely happened.

> A society generally subscribing > the female under the male might have a reason for this (maybe just: we > got fed up with the old 'mother is everything' mode). But I was also > thinking of the model (I don't remember who invented the idea) of the > possibility of a moment in time when males realized how they could be > sure that offspring was their own (and by this - ! - owerthrowing > matriarchal law of succession): controlling the women (and their > lovers) resulting in an `owner-inferior' process etc...) > How do you think it came to be?

The Indo-Europeans were pastoralists. They did the serious work. They decided where the next trek would be. They were often off on the steppe herding cattle, while the women and children were at some sort of base camp.

Contrast this to an agricultural society where the men are around the women continuously, where the women share in the farming work. Admittedly agricultural societies can be just as patriarchal as others.