Research master thesis | Linguistics (research) (MA)
open access
Although most ancient Indo-European languages share the same grammatical three-gender system of masculine, feminine and neuter gender, the lack of a feminine gender in the archaic Anatolian branch...Show moreAlthough most ancient Indo-European languages share the same grammatical three-gender system of masculine, feminine and neuter gender, the lack of a feminine gender in the archaic Anatolian branch suggests that development of this gender is a relatively recent development in "Core PIE". This thesis investigates how such a development may have come about. I analyse the attested functions of the suffixes often connected to the rise of the feminine gender: *-eh2, *-ih2 and *-sor. Moreover, I consider the emergence of the PIE feminine from a typological perspective and compare it to gender developments in other language families. On the basis of morphological and typological considerations, I suggest that not the traditional feminine suffix *-eh2, but rather the "secondary" suffix *-ih2 played a crucial role in the emergence of the PIE feminine gender.Show less
