Hallo conlangers!

On Tuesday 13 December 2011 12:44:31 R A Brown wrote:

> On 12/12/2011 21:31, Jörg Rhiemeier wrote:
> > Hallo conlangers!
> > [...]
> > What I have heard is that Early PIE had only two
> > genders, one of which ("common") included all animate
> > nouns and some inanimates, while the other ("neuter") was
> > all inanimate, and this is the state of affairs seen in
> > Hittite.  Obviously, that is basically an
> > animate/inanimate system in which some inanimate nouns
> > were moved to the former animate class for reasons that
> > are not too well understood (metaphoric animacy?  formal
> > similarity to animates?).
> 
> Something stirs at the back of my memory.  In all the IE
> langs I know, masculines & neuters have the same flexional
> endings, except in the nominative & accusative cases. The
> neuters retain the same form for both cases, whereas
> masculines always differentiate.
> 
> I seem to recall reading somewhere a theory that this was a
> hangover from a pre-PIE period when verbs were ergative as,
> e.g. in Basque.  The both 'inanimates' (i.e. neuters) and
> 'animates' (i.e. common gender) had an absolute case, but
> only 'animates' could have an ergative case, i.e. the
> nominative of the PIE masculines was a survival of the
> pre-PIE ergative.  When the language shifted to a nom-acc
> verb system, the inanimate absolute served as both
> nominative & accusative.

That has been proposed, yes, but it was rejected by most scholars,
and my opinion is somewhat different.  I think in Early PIE case
marking was split between a nominative/accusative paradigm for
animate nouns and an ergative/absolutive one for inanimate nouns.
This state of affairs is attested in Hittite, and I have read
somewhere (I don't remember where) that in many older IE languages,
neuter transitive subjects were avoided.

This may in turn have developed from an active/stative system
like that in my conlang Old Albic (which I based on just that
hypothesis).  The Indo-Uralic accusative in *-m may have started
as an "animacy-neutralizing" morpheme that was added to an animate
noun when it was used as a grammatical patient.  (It still basically
functions that way in Old Albic.)
 
> > In Late PIE, the feminine gender was branched off from
> > the common which thus became the masculine.  This started
> > with designations of female beings, but as one of the
> > most productive feminine suffixes was *-h2, just about
> > everything else that ended in *h2 was also moved to this
> > gender.
> 
> Yes, both you and BPJ have stirred some other long dormant
> memory cells; I recall now that it is held that the
> 'feminine' gender is thought to be a development of later
> stages of PIE.

Just that.  Some stubbornly old-fashioned Indo-Europeanists
still claim that Hittite has lost the feminine, but lost
grammatical categories usually leave traces, and there are
none of the feminine in Hittite.
 
> > But the problem has not been solved satisfactorily yet.
> > The messy residue is too large.
> > 
> > As for Afro-Asiatic, no idea.  I don't know what the
> > Nostraticists have to say on this matter, they probably
> > don't have any useful idea either.  (Bomhard doesn't
> > treat grammatical gender in his 2008 book.)
> 
> The double gender system of these languages remind me more
> of a yin-yang type of dualism.

Yes.  It may very well be the case that the speakers of Proto-
Afro-Asiatic adhered to a dualistic philosophy, but we'll probably
never know ;)
 
> [snip]
> 
> >> But i get enough private emails from crackpots about
> >> Pelasgians, so maybe I should be more careful where I
> >> lead threads.
> > 
> > Ah, Pelasgians.  Will we ever know which language they
> > spoke?
> 
> See:
> http://www.carolandray.plus.com/Eteocretan/Pelasgians.html
>  
>    :)

It is IMHO possible that Proto-Tyrrhenian was spoken north of the
Aegean Sea before 1200 BC, and that the Etruscans and Rhaetians
moved to Italy as part of the "Sea Peoples" migrations (Egyptian
chronicles mention some names of Sea Peoples tribes, among which
occur the Trš - who may have been the same as the Tyrsenoi or
Etruscans), and the linguistic distance between Etruscan and
Lemnian is just right for this hypothesis.  But the matter remains
speculative, and AFAIK no meaningful resemblances have been found
between the substratum vocabulary in Greek and the Etruscan
language.

> > The less is known about a matter, the more crackpots
> > write about it ;)
> 
> Of course - like the Phaistos Disk    :-D

Is there any other inscription that attracted more decipherment
attempts than this one?  And perhaps it is just a game board, or
a forgery made by a trickster who was just pulling the linguists'
legs!
 
> > Like the endless rows of volumes about Atlantis,
> 
> Groan.    :(

It is now considered plausible that the disaster narrated by Plato
has been the Santorini eruption which ushered in the decline of the
Minoan civilization, but the tale may also incorporate memories of
the Sea Peoples wars, and perhaps a memory of a lost civilization
in the British Isles (which would explain the geography of Atlantis
given by Plato - Britain *is* beyond the Pillars of Hercules, and
the description of the island of Atlantis matches Britain not
perfectly, but reasonably well, and I know of no place that fits
better).
 
> > alien visitors (both in the past and the present), and
> > other such topics.
> 
> Yep - Alien visitors seem to have taken the place of pixies,
> elves, fairies etc of earlier generations.

Yes.  It is not unlikely that both are merely different views
on the same phenomenon - which, however, may be a psychological
one rather than a race of beings coming from another planet or
another dimension.
 
> > There is of course nothing wrong with making up a
> > Pelasgian conlang,
> 
> Just as A. J. van Windekens (Le pélasgique, Louvain,1952) did ..
> 
> > but don't try to sell it as the truth!
> 
> ..sadly van Windekens did just that - a lost pre-Greek IE
> language.

Sadly.  Why must some people waste their talent on detrimental
activities?  He could have written a novel about an archaeologist
who finds inscriptions in an unknown language instead.

At least, I am not going to claim that Old Albic was ever actually
spoken in Britain!  I'll perhaps write a novel about that stuff,
but that doesn't mean that I believe that I know what was spoken
there before the Isles became Celtic-speaking.
  
> [snip]
> 
> >> They got Latinized as _fēminīnus, masculīnus, neuter_
> >> respectively, and the rest is history ...
> > 
> > What are the Sanskrit names?  BPJ perhaps knows ...
> 
> It would be interesting to know.  The Sanskrit grammarians
> were generally a little more linguistically percipient than
> the ancient Greek ones.

Yes.  I am not very familiar with Sanskrit grammar, but they did
have an elegant way of describing grammar by means that foreshadows
the sort of generative rules used in modern grammar.

> =======================================================
> 
> On 13/12/2011 07:31, Christophe Grandsire-Koevoets wrote:
> [snip]
> 
> > .................................................. The
> > Northern Sun is feminine because it's a creator, while
> > the Southern Sun is masculine because it's a destroyer.
> > 
> > As I wrote, it's probably nonsense,
> 
> I think so.
> 
> > but it's a nice way to remember how it works :P .
> 
> Mnemonics are a whole different ball game   ;)
>  
> I think Greek ἥλιος (hēlois), Latin _sōl_, Welsh _haul_ etc
> are, I think, 'masculine' simply because:
> (a) the PIE original belonged to the animate class;
> (b) it did not have final sound which shoved it into the
> emerging 'feminine' subdivision of 'animate.'
> 
> The German 'Sonne', Dutch 'zon' and English 'sun' has a
> different derivation.

According to the Duden Herkunftswörterbuch, they came from a
related form, but with stem-final /n/ instead of /l/.  The
conventional explanation is that it was a l/n-heteroclitic
(the only one known, which makes the matter suspicious) which
in PIE and also still in Proto-Germanic (North Germanic has
_sol_).  But perhaps only *seh2wel- existed in PIE, and the
West Germanic sun-word is a West Germanic innovation, the Lord
alone knows from which source.
 
> The Germanic word for 'moon' (Mond, maan, mån etc) is
> cognate with ancient Greek μείς, [gen.] μηνός  (meís, mēnós
> - stem: men-/ mēn-) and Latin _mensis_ = "month".  As both
> the Latin and Greek words are masculine, then it is hardly
> surprising that the Germanic are also masculine.

Yes.
 
> >> I've often thought that it was a bit backwards for
> >> astrologers and other pseudo-science types to go on
> >> about the generative qualities of the earth making the
> >> planet a kind of mother goddess, while making the sun
> >> some kind male sky god. But what is more generative
> >> than a star? They not only give warmth (within a
> >> certain range) to their own planets, but also sweep out
> >> all kinds of nasty radiation from space and provide,
> >> upon their death, all kinds of nice heavy elements that
> >> will form the nuclei of future planets surrounding
> >> distant and yet unborn stars.
> > 
> > Very true. But I doubt the Ancients Greeks and Romans
> > knew that! :)
> 
> Lol! Indeed not    :-D
> 
> While the ancients did indeed appreciate the life giving
> power of the sun, they clearly were in no position whatever
> to know that stars " sweep out all kinds of nasty radiation
> from space and provide, upon their death" and so on.

Surely not.  Most ancients weren't even aware that the stars were
distant suns (though some philosophers did speculate towards that
direction).

> IMO whether ancients, in languages with grammatical gender,
> personified the sun as male or female depended upon
> *grammatical* gender of the noun - not on any knowledge of
> astrology/ astronomy or any other (pseudo-)science.

Maybe.  Perhaps mythology just followed language in this matter.

--
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