Re: [tied] Gender (Was: Dating PIE)

From: Piotr Gasiorowski
Message: 10977
Date: 2001-11-04

The three-way "grammatical gender" of nAIE is just one of many possible noun-classification schemes, and it would be Euro-parochial to regard its development as something unique. A language may have no noun classes at all (i.e., no semantic markers determining the grammatical behaviour of the words that carry them, especially with respect to agreement rules), but if it has only a binary opposition, it will usually be "animate/inanimate", "feminine/masculine", "human/non-human", etc. (but more exotic classifications, e.g. "small/large", or "solid/liquid" are also possible). The "masculine/feminine/neuter" system is hardly a rarity cross-linguistically, while not being the only possible three-way classification.
 
Needless to say, once the classification has been grammaticalised, gender assignment becomes to a large extent conventional -- that is, purely formal rather than semantically based; in other words, the meaning of a word does not necessarily suffice to determine its gender. In many modern IE languages (e.g. Russian or German), the masculine gender includes "men plus a (large) residue", the feminine includes "women plus a (large) residue", and the neuter is one large residue -- a dustbin for whatever remains. A word meaning, say, "table", "star" or "tree" can be placed in any of the three residues. Djirbal (Australia) has the following genders:
 
(1) "masculine": men, most birds, fishes, reptiles and insects, moon, storm, boomerang, ...
(2) "feminine": women, dogs, fireflies, scorpions, crickets, sun, stars, fire, water, most weapons, ...
(3) "vegetable": fruit and vegetables, honey, miscellaneous plants, ...
(4) other: body parts, meat, bees, most trees and vines, grass, sounds, language, ...
 
The classification has many exceptions, and it's hard to predict where, say, "rainbow" or "stone" should be classified ((1) and (4) respectively, as it is). Even the "countable/uncountable" distinction in English (which is gender-like in that it has grammatical consequences) is partly arbitrary -- other languages may use the same semantic categories for a slightly different grammatical classification (as any student of English as a foreign language knows only too well)
 
Very large systems of noun classes (15-20+) are found in Bantu; middle-sized systems are common in some parts of Australia and the New World. Noun-class systems are often simplified diachronically, but new ones arise and undergo complication at the same time. Erosion is often gradual, whereas complication tends to happen abruptly. The nAIE three-way system has been reduced to "fenimine/masculine" or "animate/inanimate" (a.k.a. "common/neuter") in many languages. English gave it up altogether a thousand years ago. On the other hand, some Slavic languages (especially Polish, Slovak and Upper Sorbian) have recently complicated the inherited system by introducing subtle hierarchical subclassifications ([masculine, animate, human] < [masculine, animate] < [masculine]).
 
What militates against reduction in Proto-Anatolian as opposed to complication in Proto-non-Anatolian-IE is the fact (already mentioned by Miguel) that an older binary class system is implied by internal reconstruction within nAIE. Linguists of a century ago were already well aware of that -- fossil traces of the old system are quite clearly visible even in Greek and Latin. What we see in Hittite corresponds very closely to what had been independently reconstructed before Hittite was discovered.
 
Piotr
 
 
 
----- Original Message -----
From: george knysh
To: cybalist@yahoogroups.com
Sent: Sunday, November 04, 2001 6:29 AM
Subject: Re: [tied] Re: Dating PIE

*****GK: Is the gender reality distinction as between AIE and NAIE unique in the world's linguistic systems, i.e. are there other language families which exhibit a similar innovation as to gender awareness in some members of the family only as does IE?*****