PhDniX's blog

Abstract Women

Since my last article about the alternant nouns of Tocharian I've been thinking about the development of the feminine in other Indo-European languages.

The feminine gender will always be a rather mysterious thing. There's absolutely no reason why a language would have it; but still there's quite a couple of languages that do develop one. Most Indo-European and Semitic languages are the most well known ones.

But to figure out the need for the feminine; let's turn things around, and take a language that doesn't have a feminine and let it develop one.

Indo-European at one point did not have a feminine; sometimes you see it developed both a word for a female and a male animal (Like Bull and Cow), but more often than not; it just didn't distinguish at all.

Later when the Indo-Europeans were getting more settled; breeding of animals undoubtedly became more important. So let's say they wanted to breed wolves `*ulkwons' (Root is *ulkwo- an o-stem.), there was no such thing as a feminine suffix; because they simply never needed one due to a lack of grammatical gender. But they needed `something' to show that it was feminine, so they chose the suffix *-ih2 for o-stems and *-h2 for consonant stems.

These suffixes can be seen as abstractifying suffixes. And then *ulkwih2 should actually mean `wolfness', but due to the lack of other means to make a feminine, this word took on the meaning of a `female wolf'.

So there it is! That's how feminine nouns came to be! The bigger question is though; why did adjectives start to agree with the nouns?

One of the suggested possibilities is `the wanted it to rhyme'.

This works up to a certain extent; for example if you take o-stems in classical Greek, you'll definitely see extensive noun phrases with constantly the same ending, `this work' in Greek in the genitive case would for example be:
τουτου του εργου.
Even if you're not able to read Greek you'll see that the ου gets repeated a grand total of 4 times. People suggest that they wanted to achieve this effect with feminine words as well. And thus started suffixing the `feminine' suffixes to the adjectives.

This would sort of work; if it wasn't for other suffixes which end in completely different things. like the *-r/n stems, it's not like adjectives suddenly agree to the *-r/n suffix to completely the rime. And technically there's no difference between  *-r/n stems and *-ih2 stems.

So why this feminine developed; we're not sure. One thing is certain though; it developed after Hittite split off from the other languages, since there's absolutely no sign at all of a feminine in the Hittite language. Also Tocharian; although it has a feminine; shows quite a different view on it's development than other languages.

As soon as I come up with any ideas on the development of a femnine that are better than `they felt like it' I'll be sure to write about it.

The bisexual Tocharians

One of the puzzling things about Tocharian* is the Alternant gender. This is a group of nouns which in the singular, is a masculine noun, and in the plural is a feminine noun. The adjectives will also agree to different gender depending on whether this noun is in the singular or in the plural. A good example of an alternant is the noun palsko `thought'.

	Singular	Plural
Nom	palsko	pälskonta
Obl	palsko	pälskonta
Gen	pälskontse	pälskontaṃts

As you can see for the plural a -nta suffix is added. There are also other types of  suffixes for the laternants. These are: nma, wa, a, na and a few words have sa.

I've been wondering how and why this alternant developed. The answer to the question how is a lot easier to explain than why. So I'll do this first.

The nta suffix comes from indo-european *-nt suffix in the nominative-accusative neuter plural *-nt-h2. All -a's come from the nominative-accusative neuter plural actually.
wa is from the *-u stems. nma is from the *-mn stems. a is from the *-h2 stems it seems. na is from the *-n stems and sa is from the *-s stems.

Many of these words originally seem to be Indo-European neuters. Also most loanwords were placed into this category of nouns. Indo-European Neuters completely merged with the Masculine and Alternant in Tocharian, except for the pronouns, which still have a neuter.

Now we get to several why's. First. Why do these suffixes only appear in the plural. Answer: I don't know. It's also not like these are the suffixes you'd expect in either the singular or the plural. Take "hundred" for example kante which points towards an Indo-European *dḱmtóm, which luckily is the form we expect. But kante  takes a -nma suffix. Although the indo-european plural of hundred would technically be *dḱmth2. Although the -h2 suffix is there, there's absolutely no proof except for Tocharian that it should be *dḱmtmnh2. There seems to be some reason behind it sometimes. nta seems to be very productive in loanwords, and words ending in -r. While nma seems to be especially productive with words in a final consonant that isn't r. All the other categories are closed categories (new words/loan words would not be added to this category).

Second question: Why was the Neuter Nominative-Accusative Pleural suffix interpreted as a feminine suffix? This is slightly easier to answer. h2-stems after all, are generally feminine words, and even more so for the ih2-stems. But the  nominative plural of feminine h2-stems ends in *h2-es! Luckily Tocharian solves this problem. *h2e > a and word final *s disappears. Resulting in the nominative singular *-eh2 and plural *-h2es being a homophonous "a".

This homophony was later solved by analogy (feminine ih2 stems get a -na suffix), but before this analogy this is the time the neuter plural nominative-accusative was indistinguishable from the feminine nominative plural, this is how the plural of the alternant nouns became feminine.

That was the traditional approach. But FTPlus kindly notified me of another, rather controversial option. His hypothesis was: "What if the *-h2 feminines are actually neuter plurals."

This hypothesis implies that the inanimate neuters were traditionally Singular only. While the plurals of these nouns would either be mass nouns, or abstract nouns. This would also often mean that certain plurals (mass nouns) did not even have a singular equivalent, and the other way around. Reinterpretation would then lead to a new class derived from plural-only neuters. This would then be the h2-stems. which were conjugated like any other animate consonant stem.

How exactly these abstract and mass nouns got to be associated with feminine nouns so far, is a mystery to me. FTPlus suggests that women are more emotional, and would have a closer bond with abstract things than men. But I wonder if this psychological insight would have had awareness among the Indo-Europeans. I thought this insight was more of a modern popular psychology thing.

What does this mean for Tocharian?

First off, it would be better to interpret the Masculine singular as a Neuter in the alternants. Then the expected plural *-h2 Might have been impossible to the Tocharians, for it created abstract and mass nouns, which would not be the same as the plural of a singular Neuter. Therefore the chose to add a derivative suffix behind the original singular, and then add this plural *-h2. How exactly these plural suffixes were selected is yet unclear, but this is in fact quite a plausible theory, and maybe even easier to understand than the above stated form, where we don't derive the *-h2 suffix from the nominative-accustive neuter plural

*Please note that I will almost always mean Tocharian B, and I will use Tocharian B examples. Although most things I say will also count for Tocharian A, I only have deep knowledge of Tocharian B.