Gender

[Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen]

On Thu, 11 Mar 1999, Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote:
> [...]
> The lack of feminine gender in Hittite (Anatolian) suggests that
> the PIE three-gender system (masculine, feminine, neuter) is
> datable to the time between the split-off of Anatolian and the
> break-up of the rest of IE (beginning with Tocharian).
> [...]

I don't think this can be true, because:

(1) How could the feminine marker *-yeH2-/*-iH2- have been hit by the
working of ablaut if it only arose after the split-off when the process
must have been over?

(2) Adjectives like dankuis 'dark' appear to have the same background as
Lat. svavis, viz. the feminine in *-w-iH2- of u-stem adjectives (Skt.
sva:du'-s, fem. sva:d-v-i:').

(3) The allative of 'one' is sa-ni-ya in the Anitta text, rather obviously
based on *s(V)m-iH2- (Gk. m¡a fem. 'one'), conflated with some form where
the /m/ was word-final and so changed to /n/ (cf. Gk. ntr. he'n from IE
*se'm).

All in all, it looks like a two-bit reduction of the system of three
genders to two, whereby masc. and fem. formed a "common gender"
opposed to the surviving neuter just as in Dutch, Danish and Swedish.

Jens