>
> Although individual shifts in gender often have explanations (at
> least as part of a trend), the gender in one language is not a sure
> guide to the gender of the cognate word in another. Perhaps the
> best comment on this is the suggestion that the people of West
> Jutland have a poor grasp of Danish gender assignments because
their
> dialect has switched from being South Germanic to being North
> Germanic, possibly an inverse process to the absorption of the
> Danes in England.
I wash my hands of any suggestion that I should have proposed that
the Jutes once spoke "South Germanic"; if anything, "Old Germanic",
the language used before the coming of the inhumation grave people
led by somenone I'm not free to mention.
Jyske lov (1241) shows gender insecurity, but you can't get earlier
than that. I was wondering recently whethere Canute's North Sea
Empire had anything to do with the collapse of the gender system at
the same time in Jutland and England. Port of call on the Danish side
would be the mouth of the Eider river for trave up to Haithabu and
passage across. There's no sign of gender loss elsewhere in
Scandinavia (but there's a partial reinterpretation of it in Danish,
in terms of "countable" vs. "non-countable", eg 'den øl' "that
(bottle of) beer" vs 'det øl' "that (spilt) beer").
On the other hand, since between two neighbor dialects, and even
within a language family, gender assignments seem to match pretty
much (when speaking German, I can use the Danish common vs neuter
gender to infer m./f. vs n. of its cognate, on the fly), contact
between two such languages wouldn't tend to obliterate gender. Here's
an idea: Gender loss originated in Normandy, pre-1066, in attempts at
communicating in the "old language".
Torsten