Page:Nature and Origin of the Noun Genders of the Indo-European Languages.djvu/12

2 those which we are able to observe and estimate in the historical period of language development. The factors that produced changes in human speech five thousand or ten thousand years ago cannot have been essentially different from those which are now operating to transform living languages. On the basis of this principle we look to-day at a much-discussed problem of Indo-European philology with views very different from the views held by the founders of Comparative Philology and their immediate successors. I refer to the problem, how the Indo-European people came to assign gender to nouns, to distinguish between masculine, feminine, and neuter. This question is of interest to others besides philologists. What man of culture who has learned languages such as the Greek, Latin, or French has not at times wondered that objects which have no possible connection with the natural gender of animals appear constantly in the language as male or female? In German, for example, it is der fuss, but die hand; der geist, but die seele; in Latin, hīc hortus, hīc animus, hīc amor, but haec planta, haec anima, haec felicitas; in Greek, ὁ, ὁ , but ἡ πενία, ἡ .

This gender distinction pervades all the older