Re: Gender (was: LANGUAGE LAWS)

Raymond A. Brown wrote:
> Yes, and I've come across a theory that the familiar IE three gender system
> is the result of two 'different architectures' - an animate/inanimate
> division & a male/female division - but I don't recall which is thought to
> be the older system.
Animate/inanimate is thought to be older.  It is thought that the
feminine began as a sub-class of the animate gender.  The theory states
that long ago, there were no genders.  Instead, this early PIE had an
ergative case-system.  Since animate nouns were more often agents than
inanimate nouns, they developed a nominative-accusative system, with the
old ergative becoming nominative.  Inanimate nouns eventually also
acquired the nominative-accusative system, simply losing the ergative
(which is why, according to the theory, nominative and accusative are
frequently the same for neuter nouns in IE languages, e.g., Latin
bellum/bellum, cf. pater/patrum).  Thus, an animate/inanimate
distinction arose.  Later, a subclass of the animate nouns, which
included feminine nouns, became differentiated from the other animate
nouns, to form a new gender.  Since it included most of the feminine
animates, it eventually became a feminine gender (i.e., feminine
animates that were "masculine" drifted over to the "feminine" gender).
I'm not sure how widely accepted this theory is, tho.

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