gender

[Lars Henrik Mathiesen]

   From: "roslyn frank" <roslynfrank at hotmail.com>
   Date: Mon, 08 Mar 1999 06:36:58 PST

   And finally, has anyone contemplated the possibility that there might
   have been an even earlier stage that needs to be reconstructed (e.g.
   perhaps in the case of Euskera) that eventually gave rise to a
   animate/inanimate dichotomy (e.g., as it is found today in Euskera)? Any
   ideas on that, Larry? This would imply that cognitively speaking, there
   could have been an earlier structure that was not based on an
   "animate/inanimate" contrast but on another ontological type or
   definition of "being."

This line of inquiry seems to imply that the conceptual category of
gender only arose in the minds of PIE speakers with the rise of the
grammatical categories that are reflected in the daughter languages.

But grammatical categories appear and disappear through the history of
languages. In modern Scandinavian languages, for instance, a common
gender has replaced the masculine and the feminine (the neuter remains
separate). But it's still possible to indicate the sex of people and
animals by using different lexical words, by compounds, noun phrases,
or pragmatically. (Just as it is in English, come to think of it).

What I'm trying to get at is this: there may not be a need for any
different cognitive structure to explain the state of PIE before the
reconstructed morphology for marking animacy and/or gender arose. The
cognitive structure may very well have been exactly the same, but the
language had means of expressing it that cannot now be reconstructed.

Lars Mathiesen (U of Copenhagen CS Dep) <thorinn at diku.dk> (Humour NOT marked)