Page:Nature and Origin of the Noun Genders of the Indo-European Languages.djvu/13

Rh Indo-European languages, and must therefore be regarded as having its origin in the time of the pro-ethnic Indo-European community. Not only is the subject itself full of interest, but also the treatment it has received from the philological research of our century. The various efforts made to solve the problem may very aptly illustrate an essential difference which exists between the theories of language development held in the beginning and middle of this century and those which prevail to-day,—a difference of method existing not in comparative linguistics alone, but also in other fields of philological and historical research that border on it.

Permit me, then, gentlemen, in this lecture, first to set before you the views of earlier investigators on this subject, and then the position taken by scholars of more recent times.

Let me neglect, for the moment, the so-called neuter gender, and consider only the distinction made in nouns between masculine and feminine. First of all, we must notice that there is a certain difference in the mode of expressing this gender distinction in the Indo-European languages, depending upon whether it is a real physical sex that is marked, or what is usually called "formal" or "grammatical" gender, which