Page:Nature and Origin of the Noun Genders of the Indo-European Languages.djvu/31

Rh mere poetic glorification of the imaginative faculties of our ancestors, and in explaining grammatical gender as a fiction, we are not robbing them of anything we could wish them to have possessed.

You will ask, What is the truth about grammatical gender? How came the Indo-Europeans to possess it, if Grimm is in the wrong? I must consider here for a moment the so-called neuter, which has thus far been left out of the discussion. You know that the neuters in all Indo-European languages, so far as their stem formation is concerned, belong with the masculines. Latin jugum, genitive jugī, etc., has the same o-suffix that appears in words like dolus, populus; mare, maris, etc., has the same i-suffix as avis, turris. The difference between the neuters and the other genders consists only in the different case-forms used for nominatives and accusatives. The masculine nominative singular has an -s, the neuter an -m as case-sign. This is connected with a fact that I cannot here dwell upon at greater length, viz., that while the forms with -s originally served as the subject of the sentence (which could also be represented by the -m form), these -s forms had, besides this, a more specific meaning. The termination -a in