Re: Feminine Gender in Arabic

António Marques wrote:
>
> *** T. Winter wrote:
>
> > There is *no* relation between grammatical gender and sex.
>
> And at least for Indo-European languages, the relation that sometimes
> exists is a recent* phenomenon, i.e. not a remnant of any earlier stage
> where putatively gender was** perfectly aligned with sex. I point to
> this lest one should think 'ok, it's not aligned now, but that must have
> been how it originated'.
>
> (*) That is, not present originally. The original genders in IE were
> animate / inanimate.
>
> (**) How can stuff like this be expressed in english? What I mean to say is:
>
> - One may think that at some past stage gender was aligned with sex
> - But that was never so, at least in the time frame considered
> - In portuguese one would drop the 'putatively' and use 'tivesse estado'
> (past subjunctive + participle, in fact the subjunctive of _tinha
> estado_ 'had been') for 'was' above.

"would have been"
--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@xxxxxxx
.

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