Richard:
> What function did gender agreement achieve? Was it ever justified
> as a means of separating adjectives and nouns? In PIE, was it just
> a means of having contrasting 3rd person pronouns? (Classifiers
> have that use in Thai; I'd guess also in Chinese.
Not sure what you mean here but Chinese has a single pronoun "ta"
(high level tone). There is sometimes also "tie" (rising tone) for
inanimate objects.
Classifiers are used but not as pronouns if I understand you right.
Generally, they are used beside numbers like "yi-ge ren" (literally
"one CLASSIFIER person"). Perhaps only in the sense of "the one
who...". I'm a careless foreign sinophone that has forgotten many
of the classifiers I was taught, but that's okay because most
Chinese have too :) It's the same as in English... Oh sure, everyone
knows "a 'murder' of crows" and a "school of fish" but what about
oxen? Sheep? Iguanas? Etc? You can't say 'herd' for everything,
y'know. Swahili uses various pronouns for the 3p depending on the
word-class of the noun.
Richard:
> The problem is that is very difficult to discern any meaning in
> the thematic vowel, but I'm sure Glen is simply
> suggesting that it had some meaning without getting involved in a
> fruitless discussion as to its meaning.
Actually no. In my mind, it was only ever a stem that happened to
end in a vowel.
= gLeN