Page:Nature and Origin of the Noun Genders of the Indo-European Languages.djvu/23

Rh of the great majority of noun concepts as male or female. Now there are peoples to-day who still represent about the same degree of culture which we must suppose our ancestors possessed at the time when they began to differentiate nouns into masculine and feminine. Should we not find among these peoples some parallel to this mental attitude? Yet nothing has come to light at all comparable with the Indo-European sexualizing—in the sense in which it is presupposed by Grimm's hypothesis; this too, though some of these uncultured peoples look at everything in a very concrete fashion, and possess a very lively imagination, which displays itself in their language as well as in many other directions. It is not a valid objection to say here that the structure of the languages of these savage peoples is essentially different from that of the Indo-European languages, and also from that of the Semitic-Hamitic languages. In a psychological sense, the grammatical categories of our inflectional languages are to be found in every language of the earth; the mode of expression alone is different. Had the Indo-European gender suffixes originally meant male and female, or manlike and womanlike, the other languages would have been by no means without analogies