Re: Feminization of plurals?

On Wed, Feb 11, 2009 at 9:05 AM, Christophe Grandsire-Koevoets <tsela.cg@
gmail.com> wrote:

> 2009/2/11 Benct Philip Jonsson <bpj@...>
>
> > On 2009-02-11 Edgard Bikelis wrote:
> >
> >> there are some plural neuters from latin that
> >> entered in portuguese as feminines
> >>
> >
> > There are many collective neuters the
> > plural of which ended up as feminine
> > singulars in all or most Romance languages.
> > Grandgent cited FRIGORA
> > MARMORA RURA. This collective -A was
> > also extended to some masculines and even
> > to some non-first declesion feminines:
> > It. _dita, frutta, fusa, grada_, Old
> > French _crigne_ < *CRINEA < CRINES,
> > Sard, Apulian Rumanian _frunza_ <
> > *FRONDIA < FRONDES.
> >
> > Hasn't it been suggested that *-h2
> > originally was a collective and/or
> > abstract ending in the first place,
> > and that neuters in pre-PIE didn't
> > have a plural?
>
Indeed!


>
> >
> >
> What I've read is that feminines were actually a conflation of inanimate
> collective nouns in -h2 (indeed, whether it was an actual plural suffix or
> a
> collective suffix is in question, although for the purpose of the rise of
> the feminine gender it might not be that important, given that Romance
> languages didn't have that much difficulty reanalysing neuter plurals into
> feminine singulars) and animate nouns with a stem ending in -h2, which
> seemingly referred mostly to semantically female concepts (woman, goddess,
> that sort of words. Whether that was coincidence or a specific meaning of
> an
> animate -h2 ending, I don't know, and it's not important here).
>
> In other words, the phenomenon that gave rise to the feminine gender in PIE
> ends up looking very similar to the phenomenon in Romance languages that
> resulted in some plural neuter nouns being reanalysed as feminine singular:
> surface forms looking similar end up being reanalysed as a single category,
> and take on the characteristics of only one of the original groups.

It's easy to see plural collectives becoming singular feminines with
collective meaning... like if hoard from gold, people from person, army from
soldier. But how can *gWen(e)h2 'woman' rise from something like it? (there
is no neuter conterpart, as far as I know)? The feminines like *h1ek'weh2
from *h2ek'wos must be due to analogy... unless 'necklace' from 'hoard' is
indeed possible...


> In this
> case, inanimate collective nouns ending in -h2 got confused with
> semantically female animate nouns ending in -h2 (probably because the
> animate/inanimate distinction was losing its semantic meaning. Even in PIE
> the distinction is only partially semantic), and they all ended up being
> reanalysed as a single group. Since prominent members of that group
> (including the word for "woman") were semantically female, the whole group
> became a "feminine" gender.

I see, but they must have had this category _before_ all the confusion, not
because of it...


>
>
> Gender distinctions can change around quite quickly, especially when they
> are mostly arbitrary, and the surface forms are not distinctive. Witness
> Dutch, which is in the process of completely losing its
> masculine/feminine/neuter tripartite gender system for a common/neuter
> system, due to the fact that except for personal pronouns (and their
> possessive forms) in the singular, masculine and feminine forms have become
> identical (same article "de", same adjectival agreement, nouns that don't
> have distinctive forms for the masculine and the feminine gender). Other
> evidence of this phenomenon is the use of gendered personal pronouns on a
> purely semantic basis (so for instance masculine and feminine pronouns are
> only used with people or animals whose gender is known. syntactic agreement
> doesn't play a role anymore, so "het meisje": "the girl" will be referred
> to
> as "zij": "she", despite the noun "meisje" being neuter. Contrast that with
> Modern Greek, where the noun "το κορίτσι": "the girl" is also neuter, as in
> Dutch, but governs the use of the neuter personal pronoun "αυτό, το"), and
> the rise of "die": "that" as a 3rd person singular pronoun for non-neuter
> words whose actual gender is unknown (so we don't have a full loss of
> syntactic gender as in English, otherwise people would just use "het":
> "it").

Languages change at different rates... see Icelandic.

Edgard.

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