28. How did genders and cases develop in IE?
Description
This article is from the sci.lang FAQ, by Michael Covington (mcovingt@ai.uga.edu) and Mark Rosenfelder (markrose@zompist.com) with numerous contributions by others.
28. How did genders and cases develop in IE?
[--Mikael Thompson]
Early stages of proto-Indo-European (PIE) didn't have feminine gender. This
is attested in Hittite, the oldest recorded IE language; it had only
masculine and neuter genders, divided basically between animate and
inanimate objects. For most noun classes the PIE endings can be reconstructed
as follows:
Animate Inanimate
Subject *-s *-0
Object *-m *-0
For animate nouns, *-s indicated the source of action, *-m the thing acted
upon; the zero ending indicates no syntactic role. The basic idea is that
only living things can act upon other things, so only animate nouns could
take the *-s.
Such a system is characteristic of active/stative languages. Other
features of PIE fit in with this observation; for instance, in PIE objects
like fire and water which are inanimate but move seemingly of their own
will have two separate names. In many languages with an active-stative
distinction there are such pairs of words. As this distinction was lost in
IE, different branches retained just one of the words: e.g. English water,
Greek hydor, Hittite watar form one group (from PIE *wed-), while Latin
aqua is from PIE *akwa:-.
The animate nouns are the historical source for the masculine gender, and
the inanimate nouns for the neuter. This is why in all the classic IE
languages the neuter nominative and accusative have identical forms, and
the only basic difference between masculine and neuter nouns is in the
accusative.
Earlier historical linguists cheerfully reconstructed eight cases for PIE,
on the model of Sanskrit; but the IE languages with many cases are now
considered to be innovative, not conservative. The other cases developed
from postpositions or derivational suffixes. Luwian, a sister language of
Hittite, for instance, has no genitive, but has an adjective-forming
suffix -assi, as in harmah-assi-s 'of the head'. (This is an adjective,
not a genitive, because it can be declined.) Genitives in other languages
often seem to be developments of cognates to this suffix.
PIE didn't bother much with specifying plurals, but when it did, it added
an *-s or other endings. The neuter plural in all IE languages is not
descended from this, however-- active/stative languages typically don't
mark plurals for inanimate nouns-- but is instead a collective noun,
treated grammatically as a singular. This collective noun ended in *-a in
the nominative and accusative, and eventually it developed into the
feminine, which in all the old IE languages has the same form in the
nominative singular as does the neuter plural nominative- accusative. It
is also why the Greek neuter plural took a singular verb.
The reason it is called the feminine, of course, is that nouns indicating
females fell in this gender most of the time. This is puzzling, and
probably we must accept it as a fact whose explanation can't be recovered
from the depths of time.
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