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

From: Knut
Message: 11030
Date: 2001-11-06

--- In cybalist@..., "Piotr Gasiorowski" <gpiotr@...> wrote:
> 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
>
Thanks for your points.

Actually, I do not have a clear opinion whether the feminine gender
dates from a time before Anatolian or not. The only thing I wanted to
point out is that there are examples of a reduction of a three gender
system to a aninate-inanimate one that has happened very rapidly.

It is true that the scandinavian languages do not preserve the IU
word structure very well, but it is not true that flexional endings
are obsolete in those languages. Actually, a Norwegian noun
gennerally carries an ending that is clearer than the endings of such
languages as German or french, and in many respects nominal flection
have a more practical value in Scandinavian than for example in
German, but the flection is of another kind. (sigular-plural,
definite-indefinite, general form-genitive, gender marking)

However, in the scandinavian languages, the distinction between
masuline and feminine did not carry any practical value any more. For
example this distinction was not any more used to make word-pairs
with different meaning, as for example latin ursus-ursa (bear,
feminine bear), even though Scandinavian actually had (and Norwegian
still has) the neccessary endings to do so. Each noun actually was
assigned a gender, regardless of the meaning of the noun.
(An intresting point: In dayly spoken Norwegian the gender
distinction actually are more used to carry mening than in the
official language)