Re: gender in indo-european languages

From: Des Small (des.small_at_bristol.ac.uk)
Date: 09/28/04 

Date: Tue, 28 Sep 2004 08:36:59 GMT

"Peter T. Daniels" <grammatim@worldnet.att.net> writes:

> Harvey Van Sickle wrote:
> >
> > On 27 Sep 2004, Skitt wrote
> >
> > > howard richler wrote:
> > >
> > >> Unlike in English, most Indo-European languages have gendered
> > >> nouns. I'm wondering, does there tend to be consistency in
> > >> nouns being nouns being masculine or feminine (or neuter where
> > >> applicable) in the various IE languages, or at least consistency
> > >> of gender in nouns in the various Romance languages?
> > >
> > > What sort of consistency do you expect? I don't think there is
> > > any.
> >
> > I don't think he's "expecting" anything at all: it's a straight query
> > as to whether words of a given gender in one language tend to have the
> > same gender in another, or whether it's random.
> >
> > For what it's worth, I think's a brilliant question; there's probably
> > a thesis on it somewhere...
>
> You hardly need a thesis to think of le soleil/la lune vs. die Sonne/der
> Mond; le chat vs. die Katze; etc.

If it had been my question, it would have been about gender relations
specifically among cognates. One would need an overdeveloped sense of
the cosmic interconnectedness of IE to try to key off signifieds.

Des
has already written a thesis anyway 

-- 
"[T]he structural trend in linguistics which took root with the
International Congresses of the twenties and early thirties [...] had
close and effective connections with phenomenology in its Husserlian
and Hegelian versions." -- Roman Jakobson

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