Page:Nature and Origin of the Noun Genders of the Indo-European Languages.djvu/32

22 Latin plural juga was a mark of distinction for a collective signification of the noun stem. These are relationships of a very different character from the antithesis of masculine and feminine, which has up to this point received our attention. One cannot, to be sure, neglect entirely the neuter in studying the origin of the masculine and feminine, yet the development of the neuter is another question, and one subordinate to that which regards the origin of the other two genders. We can therefore omit it from this discussion.

The masculine and feminine gender is expressed by means of the so-called stem suffixes, as, for example, the contrast acc. sg. ani-mu-m and ani-ma-m shows. All suffixes which appear from primitive times in both masculines and feminines are here irrelevant to the question; such are -i-, -u-, -men-, -ter-, -es-. It is perfectly plain that these never had a specifically masculine or a specifically feminine significance, and had consequently nothing whatever to do with this distinction. Further it must be noticed, that the o-suffix in the so-called masculines, such as Latin animus, deus, Greek, , cannot originally have denoted a physical sex. This is shown by the universally recognized fact that those substantives in -o-s which denote men or