Page:Nature and Origin of the Noun Genders of the Indo-European Languages.djvu/37

Rh German meant those women who lived together in the part of the house reserved for females, viz., a number of women. Since the beginning of the eighteenth century, and up to the present time also, it means only a single woman. In this way, or in a similar way, certain abstracts and collectives in -ā- and -iē- may, in the Indo-European period, have become names for females. The common Indo-European word for woman, pro-ethnic *gṷenā (Greek, Gothic qinō, Old Church Slavonic žena), can originally have had the meaning 'bearing', 'parturition', and the transition to the signification 'the animal that bears' would have been the same as the transition of bedienung, 'service', to bedienendes wesen, bedienende person, 'one who serves', English colloquial 'help'. Pro-ethnic *ekṷā, Latin equa, can have meant originally 'a drove of horses', 'a stud '. The way it comes to mean 'mare' is shown by the German word huhn; this meant at first the cocks and the hens together, then the flock of female fowl, and finally the individual female fowl. If the suffixes -a- and -ie- implanted themselves in this manner in a number of words of feminine signification, the idea of feminine sex could attach itself to the suffixes, and they could acquire this additional shade of meaning. The final step was