Page:Nature and Origin of the Noun Genders of the Indo-European Languages.djvu/30

20 about fifteen years ago, Hunger was to be seen represented in marble as a ragged, hollow-eyed old woman. At the base of the statue was the inscription Der Hunger. A critic claimed, in a newspaper article, that this was incorrect. Der Hunger should be made a man. The artist had perhaps followed a French prototype, whose creator had chosen a woman because of la faim. The sculptor got rid of the inaccuracy, but not by carving a new statue and making it a man; he simply wrote beneath his figure the words,—Die Hungersnot.

It holds good, then, for the historical period of the Indo-European languages, that in personifying lifeless things, the sex is usually determined by the grammatical gender; and no one can prove that in such cases the anthropomorphic conception is older than the word with which our ancestors named the thing. This fact, in my opinion, destroys the foundation of Grimm's hypothesis. Jacob Grimm, with poetic fancy, sought to recall to us a beautiful idyl of the past. Sentimentalists may lament the excessive sobriety and arid intellectuality of modern grammarians, which dares in its lack of appreciation to disturb this idyl. I, for my part, cannot but feel that, in declaring the beautiful idyl to be a