On Sun, 04 Nov 2001 01:38:11 -0000,
gknysh@... wrote:
>*****GK: I'm curious as to your view of the gender issue [unified
>masculine-feminine] in Hittite (and a couple of other old Anatolian
>IE languages). Is there something similar in Hattic, Hurrian,
>Assyrian etc.? If not,how does one explain this?*****
As far as I know, it's unknown whether Hattic had grammatical gender.
Hurrian (from what little I have at hand) is said not to have
grammatical gender, but I wouldn't swear it hadn't some kind of
animate-inanimate distinction (like e.g. Sumerian had). Assyrian,
being a Semitic language, distinguishes masculine and feminine.
The fact that Hittite distinguishes animate (m./f. indistinctively)
and inanimate (n.) gender is not something that in itself requires an
explanation. It's a very common phenomenon cross-linguistically. In
fact, I think Anatolian here retains the PIE situation, while the NAIE
(non-Anatolian Indo-European) feminine gender is an innovation, as is
shown by e.g. the fact that a good number of adjectives (the athematic
ones) are still only marked for animate ~ inanimate.
The distinction between animate and inanimate itself doesn't need to
be very old in PIE. The only difference morphologically is that
neuters lack distinctive nominative (*-s) and accusative (*-m) forms,
as well as a plural (the collective in *-h2/Ablaut is grammatically
singular).