--- In
cybalist@yahoogroups.com, enlil@... wrote:
> Rob:
> > Good points. I think there is another error in my reconstruction:
> > the presumption that 'house' had a sigmatic nominative. Why would
> > this be the case? A house is surely an inanimate noun -- I think
it
> > is highly unlikely that the speakers of PIE believed that a house
> > could ever be capable of action.
>
> Whoa, watch out with that line of reasoning, Rob. It's not solid.
There's an argument that it's feminine as it's the 'mother' of its
inhabitants.
Now someone tell me why Algonquian strawberries are animate, as
opposed to inanimate.
> Burushaski, a language stuffed in a remote region of the world
> north of India, uses the word /ha/ "house", ironically assigned
> to the 'uncountable' gender. This in itself is parallel to what you
> logically would rule out above. Well, take another look.
>
> Consider German /mädchen/ "girl" which is neuter. Germans don't
think
> girls are genderless!
Just young. Most Germanic young are neuter, c.f. English 'it' for a
baby. However, the suffix forces the gender in this case.
> Or Latin /agricola/ which acts like a feminine
> noun but means "farmer", a job dominated by male workers!
1. Apart from the choice of adjective stem, masculine v. feminine
affects Latin declension only in the nominative/vocative singular of
i-stem adjectives in -ri, e.g. _acer_, _acris_, _acre_ and _celer_,
_celeris_, _celere_.
2. _agricola_ is a *maculine* noun. 'Good farmer' is _agricola
bonus_. It's just that the 1st declension is overwhelmingly
feminine. Russian also has masculine nouns in the corresponding
declension. Greek seems exceptional in the way it changed the
inflection of maculine nouns in this declension, though Russian does
allow geneder to affect the form of the instrumental singular. For
Latin _agricola_, compare 2nd declension tree names in Latin, e.g.
pi:nus 'pine', which are feminine.
I think French _sentinelle_ (f.) 'guard, look-out' is a much better
example that Latin _agricola_. As a half-way house, we have Russian
_vrac^_ 'physician', which is masculine although most physicians are
women. I've seen a paper published (c. 1980) on the fact that
Russians tend to use a female pronoun to refer to a woman physician!
Richard.