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

From: Piotr Gasiorowski
Message: 11010
Date: 2001-11-05

The conflation of m. and f. is of course possible, but as opposed to Scandinavian, Anatolian preserved the PIE word-structure quite well. It did not reduce inflectional endings, for example. The only word classes in which the three non-Anatolian genders are systematically contrasted are the "thematic" nouns and adjectives (represented here, for the sake of clarity, by the familiar nom.sg. endings *-os, *-a:, and *-om). What Anatolian shows is _not_ a merger of the historical *-os and *-a: classes (this could have happened most naturally through the assignment of Hittite endings of the -as [< *-os] declension to old *-a: feminines) but the complete absence of anything that might be connected to the *-a: type.
 
Danish and Swedish have not struck out Germanic feminines from their vocabularies; they have only eliminated their specific gender markers, which were residual anyway. Many historical *-a: feminines have Danish and Swedish cognates; it's only their distinctive gender that has been lost. By contrast, there is no systematic correspondence between non-Anatolian *-ah2 stems and Hittite -as stems. Only two possible examples have ever been proposed, as far as I know: Hitt. hissa- 'shaft' : Skt. i:s.a:- (but <hiss(a)-> is not attested in the nominative, so it isn't really certain what declension it belongs to, and even if it were the noun could have been independently thematised in both groups, since other cognates suggest that the original stem was consonantal), and hassa- 'hearth' : Lat. a:ra 'altar' (but there is evidence that Hittite <hassa-> was actually a nasal stem). Very few (maybe half a dozen) non-Anatolian *-a: stems are in any way related to a Hittite substantive, whether thematic or not.
 
In other words, there is no evidence of a putative feminine declension having been absorbed into any of the Anatolian declensional types. The most reasonable interpretation of these (and a number of other similar) facts is that the *-ah2 formation arose after the separation of Anatolian.
 
Piotr
 
 
----- Original Message -----
From: Knut
To: cybalist@yahoogroups.com
Sent: Monday, November 05, 2001 5:25 PM
Subject: Re: [tied] Gender (Was: Dating PIE)

The probability of Anatolian having reduced a three-gender system
into a animate_inanimate system:

When assessing the probability for this having taken place, in may be
useful to see if there exist examples of this in living languages.

Swedish and Danish are examples of modern languages with an animate-
inanimate classification system. At the same time Norwegian that is
so close to Swedish and Danish that it is nearly the same language,
still has the old three-gender system.

My native language is Norwegian. When waching what has occured nearly
in my own backyard in the last hundred years, I am sure the same
could have taken place when Anatolian broke away from the common
indoeuropean stock. 

Of course that does not proove that this has taken place in
Anatolian, it only  shows that such a transformation actually could
have taken place.