Page:Nature and Origin of the Noun Genders of the Indo-European Languages.djvu/17

Rh Indo-European people, who can look at everything, be it never so abstract and lifeless, as a concrete object, and as having a corporeal existence, and who, further, assign a sex in each case, masculine or feminine.

The grammarians of classical antiquity did little more with this problem than to become thoroughly perplexed over it. They contented themselves with the assertion that man uttering speech had the right to assign arbitrarily a sex to any object which had in this particular been neglected by nature. Not until the philosophic grammar of the eighteenth century took hold of the subject, was it treated in a scientific manner. Herder and Adelung were the first to attempt an explanation. They insisted that early man in his simplicity long considered everything he looked upon as animated, and treated it as a living being. Grammatical gender is, according to this, the result of the tendency of primitive man to individualize and personify. Adelung tried also to specify why in particular cases this or that gender was chosen. He says that everything which was characterized by activity, liveliness, strength, size, or had anything of the frightful or terrible in its nature was made masculine. Those objects, on the contrary, that were felt