Book contents
- Millennia of Language Change
- Millennia of Language Change
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Prologue: the Long View
- 1 Prehistoric Sociolinguistics and the Uniformitarian Hypothesis: What Were Stone-Age Languages Like?
- 2 From Ancient Greek to Comanche: on Many Millennia of Complexification
- 3 First-Millennium England: a Tale of Two Copulas
- 4 The First Three Thousand Years: Contact in Prehistoric and Early Historic English
- 5 Verner’s Law, Germanic Dialects and the English Dialect ‘Default Singulars’
- 6 Deep into the Pacific: the Austronesian Migrations and the Linguistic Consequences of Isolation
- 7 The Hellenistic Koiné 320 bc to 550 ad and Its Medieval and Early Modern Congeners
- 8 Indo-European Feminines: Contact, Diffusion and Gender Loss around the North Sea
- Sources
- References
- Index
8 - Indo-European Feminines: Contact, Diffusion and Gender Loss around the North Sea
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 25 March 2020
- Millennia of Language Change
- Millennia of Language Change
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Prologue: the Long View
- 1 Prehistoric Sociolinguistics and the Uniformitarian Hypothesis: What Were Stone-Age Languages Like?
- 2 From Ancient Greek to Comanche: on Many Millennia of Complexification
- 3 First-Millennium England: a Tale of Two Copulas
- 4 The First Three Thousand Years: Contact in Prehistoric and Early Historic English
- 5 Verner’s Law, Germanic Dialects and the English Dialect ‘Default Singulars’
- 6 Deep into the Pacific: the Austronesian Migrations and the Linguistic Consequences of Isolation
- 7 The Hellenistic Koiné 320 bc to 550 ad and Its Medieval and Early Modern Congeners
- 8 Indo-European Feminines: Contact, Diffusion and Gender Loss around the North Sea
- Sources
- References
- Index
Summary
As we noted in Chapter 2, the very earliest known form of Proto-Indo-European had only two grammatical genders: Fortson (2010: 114) tells us that ‘the oldest preserved branch of Indo-European, Anatolian, had only a two-way distinction between animate or common gender and inanimate or neuter’. According to Ringe (2006: 24), however, all the extant modern Indo-European varieties descend from the non-Anatolian branch of Proto-Indo-European, which he calls North Indo-European, which represents a more complex and innovative stage of Proto-Indo-European in which, at some point after 4200 bc, ‘a three-way contrast in grammatical gender between masculine, feminine, and neuter’ (Fortson 2010: 114) had developed. It is widely agreed that the innovation which gave rise to the new tripartite system was precisely the development of the new feminine gender.
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- Information
- Millennia of Language ChangeSociolinguistic Studies in Deep Historical Linguistics, pp. 102 - 128Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2020