"glen gordon" <
glengordon0-@...> wrote:
original article:
http://www.egroups.com/group/cybalist/?start=1035
>
> > Correction, Glen. Agricola is masculine, though it looks
> > >feminine. Same for poeta, scriba, etc.
>
> Whoops, gotcha. My bad. Thanks Piotr. Therefore it would have
originally
> been _animate_ then?
>
You bet it would. Inanimate farmers are little use to anybody. (I'm not
going to crack any risque jokes about feminine-looking farmers.)
Agricola is from ager (*agros) 'field' + -cola (*kWol-a:) 'someone who
attends to', so the *-a: is agentive, as in the Polish nouns I quoted,
or as in Greek masculines in -e:s (*-a:s; the *s is secondary).
Originally the ending was *-a:x (with a final laryngeal), a rather
multifunctional morpheme in PIE.
Piotr
Piotr