Re: Gender of rivers - and other waters.

I think maybe the answer is to be found in early linguistics works. The only
languages that, for historical reasons, most of the philologists had
exhaustive grammatical knowledge of would be Latin and Greek. So was it the
Latins who put these nouns into three classes, or was it the scholars?
It would be interesting to know how Valmiki and the Sanskrit grammarians
treated nouns in that language. Anyone know?
Mike
(who now wished Omina had noun classes!)
>
> Yes, but why?  Why did they decide to call "die" words feminine instead
> of solar or one of any number of categories that we humans use?  Is it
> because a preponderance of female objects were in this class?  What was
> the pull of the masculine-feminine-neuter classification that we're all
> used to?  Why did the Latins, for example, with five declensions, put
> all their nouns, regardless of declension, into three classes?
>