Me, in response to Torsten and my areal influence idea:
>Really? I think it did: Tyrrhenian.
Richard:
>I believe Torsten was referring to Anatolian's lack of a feminine.
Well, since that doesn't make sense in relation to what I was
saying... maybe he _was_ referring to that.
The lack of feminine in Anatolian is irrelevant. The point is that
Semitic has two genders and IE has two genders. In Semitic,
the feminine and collectives seem to go together, but Semitic
doesn't have an inanimate gender. It would appear to me that
there is a similar relation between IE inanimate gender and
collectives. However, IE didn't originally have a feminine. Yet
coincidently, the *-ax ending appears to have derived from an
inanimate ending, as though feminines were thought of as
collectives or inanimate. Proto-Tyrrhenian, I'd dare say, had
two genders like IE as well -- animate and inanimate. Again, I'd
say that, like in IE, feminine nouns were often treated
grammatically as if they were collective inanimates.
Perhaps feminists now hate me at this point, but this is what
I notice in three neighbouring language groups. So I naturally
think about the possibility of areal influence. We already have
a case for mutual interaction so this seems like the next level.
= gLeN
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