>I know from my understanding of Tok Pisin in the highlands of Papua >New
>Guinea, that they make no pronoun distinction between male and >female.
That isn't unusual. In fact, closer to home, Altaic and Uralic languages
hold the same lack of distinction in the 3rd person singular and plural, as
do SinoTibetan languages like Mandarin and Cantonese. I view the
circumstances, in these languages at least, to be ancient. Uralic and Altaic
stem from Nostratic and that language probably only made a distinction of
animate vs. inanimate through syntax. Dene-Caucasian can be seen to have had
a complex grammar that involved a large set of "word classes" (which are in
effect gender classes) but again, no formal classes for "masculine" or
"feminine", more along the lines of animate/inanimate, human/non-human, etc.
I believe, as far as I remember, that even Tagalog has "sila" which is used
for either gender. Mayan too, and EskimoAleut, and Swahili, and Zulu, and
Basque, and ...
>PIE, I believe did, with the result that in a number of modern
>languages all nouns have become genderised.
Not exactly. The original gender distinction was animate/inanimate as is
seen in Anatolian. It only later was replaced with a
masculine/feminine/neuter distinction once Anatolian was on its own. The
masculine gender is largely the animate gender. The feminine gender is
largely from certain kinds of inanimate nouns often ending with vowel final
suffixes (from loss of laryngeal). This can be seen by the famous example in
Latin of "agricola" for "farmer" which oddly is a _feminine_ noun - it was
not originally.
Correction, Glen.
Agricola is masculine, though it looks
feminine. Same for poeta, scriba,
etc. The Slavic languages still have many such nouns, e.g.
Polish zdrajca 'traitor' or
kłamca 'liar' with a "feminine" ending.
Conversely, Latin nurus
'daughter-in-law' is grammatically feminine despite its
-us (as is Greek nuos, both <
*snusos); another well-known case is Greek
parthenos (f.) 'girl, virgin'. Also Latin names of
trees and shrubs are generally feminine even if they look masculine:
malus 'apple-tree', fraxinus 'ash', ,
fagus 'beech', rubus 'bramble', etc.
Thus also in Greek: apios 'pear-tree', phe:gos
'species of oak' were feminine.
Some Latin (as well as Greek, Sanskrit,
Hittite ...) nouns could have either natural gender irrespective
of their form: Latin bos 'cow (f.)/ox (m.)'. Greek
ho anthro:pos meant 'he-human (= man)', while
he: anthro:pos meant 'she-human (= woman)' (same for
horses, cattle, sheep, dogs, hares, foxes etc.).
Piotr |
