Re: What's a gender?
| From: | Jörg Rhiemeier <joerg_rhiemeier@...> |
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| Date: | Saturday, December 30, 2006, 11:40 |
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Hallo!
On Fri, 29 Dec 2006 21:00:56 +0100, Lars Finsen wrote:
> Den 29. des. 2006 kl. 13.31 skrev Mark Reed:
>
> > Italian is notable for its number of m sg -> f pl nouns, to be sure,
> > but Spanish and other romlangs also exhibit the phenomenon. I believe
> > the nouns in question all (or at least mostly) derive from Latin
> > neuters, which resemble masculine nouns in the singular and feminine
> > (singular) nouns in the plural.
>
> They do the same in Norwegian, actually, unlike Swedish and Danish.
> An old IE heritage, I guess.
I didn't know that this happened somewhere else than in Romance. But the
seeds of this phenomenon were indeed already laid in PIE. Feminines were
derived from masculines by the suffix *-h2, which suffixed to a thematic
stem yielded *-eh2 > *-a:. Now the neuter plural was a homophonic *-eh2
> *-a: - hardly surprising that these two endings got confounded in some
IE languages.
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