Gender

[Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen]

On Mon, 15 Mar 1999, Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote:

> Supposing the two examples above [Hitt. dankui-s 'dark' and sani- 'one,
> same' - JER] are correctly analyzed as
> containing *-iH2, it only follows that Anatolian had nouns and
> adjectives ending in *-iH2.  As it probably (had) had *-eH2 and
> *-uH2.  The question is whether it can be shown that these
> suffixes (if suffixes they are) at one stage served to denote
> feminine gender in (Pre-)Proto-Anatolian.  Now, if the neuter of
> dankuis were danku, you would have a case, but I believe it's
> dankui.  We also have *-(e)H2 in Anatolian to mark the neuter
> plural, but no trace of it as a feminine marker.

What would (pre-)Anatolian have these forms for, if not for the feminine?
What is the common indication of <<presence of morpheme in Anat. and rest
of IE> + <fem. function of that morpheme in rest of IE, no detectable
function in Anat.>>? By normal standards that is <shared original
morpheme marking the feminine>. Comparing Icelandic _widh_ 'we'
and _thidh_ 'you' with extra-Norse Germanic one will immediately guess
that they match the duals, OE wit, git (especially since hvadh matches
hwaet), the 2nd person with /th-/ from the sg. thu. But you could object
saying, No it only means there were FORMS of the shape matching the duals
of the other languages, not that they WERE ever duals themselves - they
may instead proceed from an older system from which the duals also come,
but - unfortunately - have lost their mysterious but interesting original
function. Now, in this case older Icelandic does restrict these forms to
dual function, so here we know. The only difference I see between this
easy example and that of the fem. morphemes lying around in Hittite is
that, in the latter case, we have no direct attestation of the stage where
the morphemes were still fem. markers.

> There are indications even outside of Anatolian that the feminine
> gender is of relatively recent origin.

Sure, but there are more than two stages in pre-IE. There is ample time
for a "relatively recent" feminine marker to lose its
gender-distinguishing function and just become an occasional stem
enlargement of individual adjectives. That is a process we know and
understand and one that would lead to the picture we find.

> The general impression one gets of Hittite is that of an "active
> language" in Klimov's terms (see Lehmann, G & I), with a central
> role played by the opposition animate ~ inanimate.  The use of
> the "ergative" suffix -ant(s) (inanimate <watar> --> animate
> <wetenants> when the subject of transitive sentence), the mi-
> (active) and hi-/-ha (stative/middle) conjugations.  There is no
> sign or trace of feminine gender, no 3rd. person feminine
> pronominal forms [tell-tale sign in Dutch, Swedish and Danish
> that these languages once had a feminine gender; but of course
> also absent in e.g. Armenian], the lack of any formal marker for
> feminine nouns (except suffixed -sara) and the lack of feminine
> agreement in the adjective.

The "ergative" extension of neuters is post-Old Hittite according to
Kammenhuber (Fs. Winter 1986), but that is of no relevance to the gender
question. There is ergative in Kurdish, and Proto-Iranian did have three
genders.

> In view of this, I prefer the more parsimonious explanation that
> Hittite maintains the ancient state of affairs (active/inactive
> nouns and verbs) and the other languages have developed a
> 3-gender system out of an earlier animate ~ inanimate one, than
> to suppose that Hittite once had a feminine gender, then lost it,
> and reverted exactly to the state PIE must have had in the first
> place before feminine gender developed.

I do not see the parsimony - or even the good sense - in assuming that
dankuis contains a suffix of
"some-other-function-just-for-heaven's-sake-not-feminine" and has used it
in a place where a feminine marker would have made sense and it is indeed
used in the other languages - as opposed to the very simple assumption
that this IS the feminine marker that has lost its meaning, just as it has
in many adjectives of later individual languages.

Jens