The Feminine Gender in Indo-European - Exploring Anatolian Echoes and the Curious *-h2 suffix
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- čas přidán 17. 11. 2023
- We are going head first into the Proto-Indo-European feminine gender, exploring its origins and some very controversial traces in the Anatolian languages! 📜🗺️ (I can't wait to read people's opinions on this 😉)
From the early days of PIE with a two-gender system to the development of the feminine marked by the *-h2 suffix, linguists have uncovered a fascinating evolution - but that discovery was an extremely arduous one.
Discover the consensus at the beginning and end of this linguistic tale, where most agree on a three-gender system. 🤔 However, the middle part remains a debated terrain. Croatian linguist Ranko Matasoic suggests a split within the inanimate gender, resulting in the animate, inanimate/abstract, and inanimate concrete categories-masculine, feminine, and neuter but was he right?
Well, esteemed linguist Silvia Luraghi has something to say about that....
Anatolian languages add an intriguing twist to the narrative, as they don't overtly maintain a three-gender system. 🤷♂️ Explore three possible explanations: Did Anatolian lose the third gender, was it never part of the proto-Indo-European continuum, or did it break away during the formation of the feminine, leaving obscure traces?
Linguist Melchert's journey from attributing Anatolian with a feminine gender in 1992 to his later claims in 2014 adds an element of mystery. 🕵️♀️ What happened in Anatolian during the development of the feminine gender, and does evidence in Lycian provide some clues?
Join the discussion on the linguistic nuances of gender development, appreciate the scholarly debates, and explore the enigma of Anatolian in this captivating linguistic exploration! 🧐🗣️
#ProtoIndoEuropean #Linguistics #AnatolianLanguages #FeminineGender #LanguageEvolution #Hittite #indoeuropean #lycian
Selected references (In no particular order)
Kalinka E. & Akademie der Wissenschaften in Wien. (1901). Tituli asiae minoris. vol. 1 tituli lyciae lingua lycia conscripti. Alfredi Hoelderi.
Kim, R. I. (2014). "A Tale of Two Suffixes: *‑h2‑, *‑ih2‑, and the Evolution of Feminine Gender in Indo-European". In Studies on the Collective and Feminine in Indo-European from a Diachronic and Typological Perspective. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill. doi.org/10.1163/9789004264953...
🌟 Melchert, H. C. (2014). "PIE *‑eh2 as an “individualizing” Suffix and the Feminine Gender". In Studies on the Collective and Feminine in Indo-European from a Diachronic and Typological Perspective. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill. doi.org/10.1163/9789004264953...
'The Feminine Gender in Anatolian,' in Früh-, Mittel-, Spätindogermanisch. Akten der IX. Fachtagung der indogermanischen Gesellschaft (ed. George Dunkel et al.) (1994)
Luraghi, (2009b). Indo-European nominal classification: From abstract to feminine. In S. W. Jamison, H. C. Melchert, B. Vine, eds., Proceedings of the 20th Annual UCLA Indo-European Conference, Bremen, Hempen, 115-131
🌟Luraghi, S. (2011). The origin of the Proto-Indo-European gender system: Typological considerations. Folia Linguistica, 45(2), 435-463. doi.org/10.1515/flin.2011.016
Luraghi, (2009a). The origin of the feminine gender in PIE: An old problem in a new perspective. Grammatical Change in Indo-European Languages , pp 3-13
Tichy, E. (1993). Kollektiva, Genus femininum und relative Chronologie im Indogermanischen. Historische Sprachforschung / Historical Linguistics, 106(1), 1-19. www.jstor.org/stable/40849074
🌟Matasović, R. (2004). Gender in Indo-European.
🌟Kloekhorst, A. (2019). Kanišite Hittite: The earliest attested record of Indo-European. (Particularily chapters 3,5 and 8 but the whole book is a must read tbh)
Melchert, H. Craig. 1992. Relative Chronology and Anatolian: the Vowel System.In Robert Beekes et al. (eds.), Rekonstruktion und Relative Chronologie, 41-53 (Innsbrucker Beiträge zur Sprachwissenschaft Band 65). Innsbruck:Institut für Sprachwissenschaft der Universität Innsbruck.
Meester, L. (2020). The origins of the PIE feminine gender: Reconsidering the evidence from Proto-Indo-Anatolian to Proto-Indo-European. (Master's thesis, Comparative Indo-European Linguistics, Leiden)
Sasseville, D. (2018). New Evidence for the PIE Common Gender Suffix eh2 in Anatolian: Luwian -ašša (c.) and Lycian B asa (c.). In 100 Jahre Entzifferung des Hethitischen Morphosyntaktische Kategorien in Sprachgeschichte und Forschung: Akten der Arbeitstagung der Indogermanischen Gesellschaft vom 21. bis 23. September 2015 in Marburg.
Music:
Vespers on the Shore - The Mini Vandals
Sao Meo - Doug Maxwell_ Zac Zinger
First and foremost - Thanks to @tiagorodrigues3730 for the video request, and @francisnopantses1108 for seconding it!
By far the most challenging video I have ever made! I hope the narrative makes sense, it was hard to condense so many decades of discussion and research into a video that has I length I could possibly edit (this one took 10 days of pretty solid work) and that viewers would have the stamina to watch. But I have to say, the subject is fascinating and understanding the concept is one thing but trying to present it...well, that's something else!
And how about that Anatolian evidence? the asue/assue suffix is interesting, and that Lycian adjective agreement? I think it's also important to remember that there's evidence from Greek that adjective agreement came quite late (there's some indication that feminine nouns used to take masculine adjectives). I wonder just how late Anatolian branched off from PIE during its feminine formation?
One last thing! Sorry for the echoey audio. I reflected that in the title! 😉I think I know what I need to do to stop that from happening next time!
What a fascinating discussion! Thank you very much for all the effort you expended researching and telling this story. Surely, the weight of the evidence lies with Anatolian not making the jump from the abstracting suffix to feminine, but it does not necessarily prevent such an agreement being developed later under the influence perhaps of other IE languages like Greek or Thracian who neighbored the Lycians, just as the feminine-gender innovations surely must have started in some specific clan and then spread through the speech community back in the Chalcolithic.
No problem, thanks again for your suggestion! I agree with your point about Greek or Thracian potentially having a later input.
Malija Erijupama! Lycian is contemporary with Ionic, so the possibility of influence from other languages we already know stuff about should be considered as well.
The first two names in your list, Šakriašue and Šikriašue, reminded me immediately of something we see recurring in Minoan Linear A inscriptions: šukiriteia. Kloekhorst in *Kanišite Hittite* (2022) says that the origin and meaning of this root he calls "ša/ikri(a)-" are unknown and obscure, so I really bet that it could have been floating around in a Mediterranean onomastic pool, or should I say sea!
Interestingly, the IE origin of the Latin adjective "sacer, whence we get English "sacred," is in fact poorly attested, the only currently proposed cognate outside of Italic being Hittite šāklāi-/sākli- "custom; rite." But in Kloekhorst's own (Etym. Dict. Hitt. Inher., 2007) treatment of the etymon, he makes it clear that the connection to Italic is not exceptionally well substantiated.
With this, it should be noted that Plautus, one of Latin's oldest preserved poets (3rd/2nd cents. BCE), appears to have an instance in which sacer is pronounced sācer. Perhaps this makes the proposed connection to Hittite a little bit stronger, but more importantly, it adds another coin to the "loanword rather than inherited word" jar.
If I had to guess, I would say for "ša/ikri(a)-" that we're looking at a name or even a word that was very important first in some non-IE language. That wouldn't necessarily have been the language of Minoan Linear A, but it seems to have at least become very important in Minoan Linear A. (sacer and šāklāi are best treated as just two footnotes that one might do well to carry around with it.)
See also Edward Lipiński, "Hurrians and their Gods in Canaan" (2016), about the prevalence of the Hurrian name Šukri. van Soesbergen uses this to argue that Minoan Linear A sukiriteia means "šukri-Teshub," but I think that the ending is likely a suffix, another god, or another name.
Thanks for the informative comment! I'll check out Lipiński's work as you suggested. It looks very interesting. I've studied some Hattic and it's been on my to do list for a while to take a look at some Hurrian stuff 👍
Interesting how several of the modern Germanic languages have reverted to the old Common / Neuter gender system.
Informative video! Keep up the good work.
Thank you very much for the kind words, it keeps me motivated!
Fantastic video! This channel is great! Looking forward to more content! Thank you!
Thanks for the kind words! They keep me motivated
Thanks for answering so many of my questions about the PIE 😊
Any time! 👍
Digging so deep, thanks!
Thank you for sharing your research.
Not a problem and thank you very much for your kind words
I consider your channel a blessing! On the other hand, for an entire language family, a single example of what may be feminine gender agreement seems to me a little meagre. But I may return to revise this comment once I have a chance to ruminate over the presentation which is superb anyway.
Oh I completely agree, it is meagre and I don't think tha Anatolian branch had any kind of functional feminine, that being said, the suspected instances of it are interesting in and of themselves and worthy of a closer look in my opinion. Oettinger 1987 is another curious article worthy of reading on motion suffixes in Anatolian.
And thank you very much for your kind words! They keep me motivated
Is it the case that the oldest texts have "asue" in a higher frequency compared to the youngest texts?
The attestations of asue come from Old Assyrian cuneiform sources of 20th - 18th centuries BCE, I believe in actual Hittite texts proper, it hasn't been recorded at all (to my knowledge)
I don’t know why the different uses of h₂ have to derive from each other. Why can’t there be three different suffixes pronounced as the second laryngeal: a female -h₂, an abstract -h₂ and a collective -h₂?
Maybe in some lost, earlier stage of the language, they were distinct (say, female -ih₂, abstract -h₂ and collective/mass -eh₂, or something more exotic like -eh₂h₁) but converged on a common -(e)h₂ form due to phonological change, which then allowed them to get mixed up with each other in various ways, such that (and I’ll use Latin reflexes as examples) female words with the female suffix (like ‘femina’) were the core of the feminine gender, with female words without the suffix (e.g. ‘mater’) joining it by their meaning, but abstract (e.g. ‘violentia’) and some collective/mass (e.g. ‘aqua’) words with the suffix joining in by their form; whereas other collective/mass words (e.g. ‘saxa’) would be reinterpreted as plural forms of the inanimate, neuter words from which they derive via the suffix.
At the same time, the animacy trait of common-gender nouns (which would now all become masculine or feminine depending on form and meaning) would be considerably weakened, so speakers would no longer feel weird using non-neuter agreement for words that refer to things really lacking any vibe of animacy. At this point, you have a fully arbitrary three-gender system that you have to memorise for all words (although the form of many gives big clues).
Although not exactly as you've put it, Luraghi does state something similar. She gives two seperate developments-
1. Derivational suffix turns inflectional
2. The non obligatory suffix turns into an obligatory vowel which is subsequently viewed as a marker of noun class
As I understand, Luraghi interprets these as two independent developments involving h2
What's also in her paper (the 2011 one) is that she used data from noun class developments from other language families to support her arguments. Honestly, I can't comment on how legitimate they are because she selected a really broad range of language families that I have no experience in, but it's worth a read nonetheless.
@@LearnHittite I may well give that a read. It’s been a while since I’ve got deep into linguistics. I’m just a practical kind of language person (multilingual interpreter & translator).
We have a similar background then! If you do read the paper, let me know what you think
Man I missed this one... I own that book and based on some research the alledged feminine gender indication would be an a/e
Hence words such as išhas-išhassara (lord-lady)
Or how the book would present it; Hšu-Hšušar
I wonder if there was or is an ethnic group like ,e.g
he is an Anatolian, what kind of people they are???
Anatolia is a greek symbolic logistic name of that place.
As far as I remember thousands years ago the place was called Arme'nian Highlands.
Linguists should take a close look at diverse treatment in Indic languages - which are assumed to be split later from Proto Indo European :
Bengali has no grammatical gender. Pronouns, adjectives and verbs do not morph to agree with the noun according to gender although nouns may indicate gender. For example nara = man, naari = woman.
In Hindi, there is no neuter gender. All nouns are divided into masculine or feminine by convention. In Marathi on other hand, there are three genders but some inanimate objects are masculine or feminine and some animate objects are neuter (similar to in Sanskrit)
Book (pustak) is feminine in Hindi, masculine in Marathi and Sanskrit. Child (baal) is neuter in Marathi and Sanskrit unless specific words for male child (baalak) or female child (baalika) are used.
In Hindi and Marathi adjectives typically do not morph to agree with noun-gender but the verbs do morph. In Sanskrit, on the other hand, adjectives morph to agree with noun but verbs do not.
Examples:
Beautiful boy went/goes:
Hindi: Sundar baalak gayaa/jaataa hai.
Marathi: Sundar baalak gela/jaato aahe.
Sanskrit: Sundar baalak agachhat/gachhati
Beautiful girl went/goes:
Hindi: Sundar baalika gayi /jaati hai.
Marathi: Sundar baalika geli/jaati aahe .
Sanskrit: Sundaraa baalikaa agachhat/gachhati
I'm not really sure about neuter nouns, as my latin class hasn't gotten there yet, but it seems like the feminine nouns are very similar to masculine nouns, whereas neuter nouns are much more separate. in hittite, the neuter case forms look very different from common case forms, witch is interesting. in latin, the accusitive masc ending is -um, and the feminine ending is -am. the -h2 theory would explain the vowel alternations. another observation is that a distinction between common and neuter nouns seems much more conceptual, with animacy being the main factor. in the romance languages, it seems to be much more phonetic. a noun ends in -a even though it's masculine, it should then become feminine despite being usually associated with men.
And yet, look at how masculines and neuters are both in the second declension, with the first declension being quite different and almost entirely feminine.
Overall, the masculine is the least unique gender in Latin, with feminines and neuters differing from it in various ways.
i clicked because i thought this was gary v
I have to ask, who is Gary?