gender

[Glen Gordon]

GEORGE MANTZOUKIS:
 Dear Glen Gordon and IE-ists, [...]

Zzzz, zz, huh? Oh-oh, my name is being mentioned. I guess that means I
have to respond... :)

GEORGE MANTZOUKIS:
 If I am interpreting you right, Glen, you think that
  1) IE originally started out with no gender distinction at all
  2) Animate/inanimate distinctions developed sometime "later".

Yes to both.

GEORGE MANTZOUKIS:
 When do you think these distincions developed? Was it within PIE and
 the Anatolian group inherited it, or was it within Proto-Anatolian?

Both Miguel and I, at least, think that Indo-European and
Etrusco-Lemnian are related and part of a larger language group (in
other words a kind of Early PIE or Pre-IE). I personally call it
Indo-Etruscan but I think I've heard Miguel mention "Indo-Tyrrhenian".
When we examine Etruscan or Lemnian, we don't really find any evidence
of grammatical gender distinctions at all whether that be
masculine-feminine-neuter or animate-inanimate, of course this may be
due to the scarcity of linguistic material to examine.

Getting out of Indo-Etruscan and into Indo-Anatolian IE, we find a
common system of animate-inanimate distinctions but no trace of use of
any suffixes for purposes of feminine like the ones we find in
non-Anatolian languages. Mind you, there are nouns with "feminine
suffixes" but they are nonetheless declined as "animate" nouns. The
feminine grammatical gender as we know it in non-Anatolian languages
simply isn't there in Anatolian. This combined with the fact that other
grammatical systems appear lesser developed in Anatolian compared to the
non-Anatolian languages makes it very likely that Anatolian preserves a
simpler state of affairs.

It's hard to uphold the arguement that features like the feminine had
been simply lost because, as I say, we really can find no trace at all
of an earlier feminine gender and we should expect such a feature to
still have been preserved in some way if this were the case.

Lastly and most superficially, I take a possible genetic relationship
between Indo-Etruscan and Uralic as being most probable. We don't find
any trace of gender distinction at all in Uralic. If you're asking about
when I think gender distinctions of any kind developed in IE, I would
wager sometime between 4,500 and 3,500 BCE as a vague guess.

GEORGE MANTZOUKIS:
 Are there any good arguments in favor of animate/inanimate
 distinctions in Greek or Latin?

Words like <agricola> "farmer" is a usual one. Of course, you really
can't beat <mater> "mother" with the *-ter ending that marks the
masculine word *pHter. Eventually, everyone must succumb to the idea
that there was once only an animate-inanimate grammatical contrast.
Resistance is futile. :)

--------------------------------------------
Glen Gordon
glengordon01 at hotmail.com