Gerry: What you say Glen is fascinating. So Altaic and Uralic (likely
derived from Nostratic) have no gender distinction in IIIrd person S and
P. But Mandarin and Cantonese do. Do you know whether the early
Semitic languges are similar to Altaic and Uralic or to Mandarin and
Cantonese. Seems to me that they would profile with more similarity to
?Nostratic i.e. Altaic and Uralic.
Back to the Nostratic. You say that the only distinction between
animate and inanimate was through syntax. Are you suggesting some type
of gender connection between animate and inanimate? And as I read below
you equate male with animate and female with inanimate.
And Dene-Caucasian also had no gender references? Have you begun to
speculate why? Here's a bit of gossip for you: a local neurosurgeon
(Palo Alto Hospital) claims that sexual dimorphism doesn't show up on
the CAT Scan. Is there a possibility that our early ancestors did not
recognize gender?
Glen: 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 ...
Gerry: Gosh! At the rate you're going you'll have all the world
languages linked up!
>PIE, I believe did, with the result that in a number of modern
>languages all nouns have become genderised.
Glen: 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.
Gerry: Perhaps it was the farmer (feminine) who remained at the
homestead while the hunter (male) brought back the goodies, or perhaps
didn't bring back the goodies. Actually, why would he need to bring
anything back if the female had the digging stick?
Awaiting your reply (or from anyone else),
Gerry
--
Gerald Reinhart
Independent Scholar
(650) 321-7378
waluk@...
http://www.alekseevmanuscript.com