Page:Nature and Origin of the Noun Genders of the Indo-European Languages.djvu/16

6 all of the languages have preserved this peculiarity. The English, for example, has but a few remains. These languages without grammatical gender are just as well off. The category is entirely superfluous as regards the main purpose of language, which is to express thought in the clearest possible manner. Not only superfluous is it, but often even contradictory and foolish. Sophists like Protagoras held this opinion in antiquity. They ridiculed the gender distinctions of the Greek, and it is easy to see why. What real connection with animal gender have all those concepts which our primitive ancestors characterized as masculine or feminine? This peculiarity of our language does not usally cause any practical difficulty to us Indo-Europeans. We learn it, as we learn all other peculiarities of the language structure, in early childhood. It enters in sucum et sanguinem with the rest. People who are not ludo-Europeans, whose mother tongue has no formal gender, have a very different experience, when in more mature years they learn a language like the Greek or Latin. A new world opens itself to them as they find, for example, Latin animus called a masculine form, and anima a feminine form. They marvel at the imagination of the