--- In
cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Torsten" <tgpedersen@...> wrote:
> ...and before that why non-Anatolian IE decided to introduce a feminine gender.
Actually, I think I can see a mechanism, if this is indeed historically correct. (Cue the alternative view from Copenhagen?)
This mechanism relates gender to the concordance of case in IE and of definiteness in Greek and Hebrew. The root cause I see is that attributive adjectives were treated as being in apposition with the noun they qualify. Thus, it is not so unnatural for the adjective to also have the case marking that was applied to the noun, and, where appropriate, for both to have the article. This pattern seems to be taken to extremes in Hurrian, which on the Anatolian hypothesis is not so far removed geographically from Indo-European. (I disagree with Arnaud Fournet's idea that Hurrian and Indo-European are related.)
Now, there is evidence that the nominative case was only applied to animates in early Indo-Hittite. Thus the difference between the animate and inanimate nominative may originally have been a case difference. As it ceased to be a case difference, grammatical agreement could have been born.
Feminine adjectives can then have arisen as a choice to use explicitly feminine words in apposition. In some ways, e.g. the freedom of choice between -yah2 and -ah2, they look more like derivatives than inflection. I'm not sure how significant the collective/neuter plural in -ah2 would have been - it doesn't always agree with the feminine singular ending.
This may seem extreme, but Modern English has two glimmerings of adjectival masculine v. feminine agreement. The first is the written opposition of <blond> and <blonde> and what feels like the suppletive alternation of _handsome_ for men and _beautiful_ for women. There are plenty of counterexamples to such an agreement rule, but the statistical trend is there.
Richard.