पृष्ठम्:The Sanskrit Language (T.Burrow).djvu/२०८

202 THE FORMATION OF NOUNS inine, and Neuter. This classification corresponds only partly to the natural order of things, that is to say in so far as the nouns or adjectives apply to human beings and to certain of the larger animals. For the rest of the language the choice of gender is arbitrary and without any logical foundation. In spite of this the system has proved remarkably tenacious in the majority of IE languages ; in the modern Indo-Aryan languages, for in- stance, where traces of the old IE grammatical system have been reduced to a minimum, the system of grammatical gender remains in operation. Languages such as English or Persian which have abolished the distinction remain a minority even now among the descendants of Indo-European. A study 'of the evidence provided by the comparison of the IE languages particularly of those which are recorded at an early period, enables some insight to be gained into the origin of this system. This is because grammatical gender was, at the period of Indo-European which can be reached by comparison, a comparatively recent innovation, and evidence enough can be gathered from the main existing languages, to understand the nature of its development. Two stages can be traced in this development. At the earliest stage there were two classes of nouns, on the one hand a 1 com- mon gender ' later differentiated into masculines and feminines, and on the other hand the ‘ neuters This state of affairs is faithfully reflected in Hittite, which is distinguished from all other IE languages by the absence of a special feminine gender. The next stage sees the development of the feminine, and it is only at this period that it is proper to speak of gender in the true sense. The existence of an earlier dual system is attested not only by Hittite, but also by abundant evidence gathered from the re- maining languages. MeiUet and others had adopted it on the basis of this latter evidence before anything much was known about Hittite, and the discovery of Hittite has gone further to confirm the theory. Attempts have been made to explain the dual system of Hittite as due to the loss of the feminine gender in that language, but no satisfactory evidence has been adduced for this. The fact is that the evidence of the other languages points unambiguously to the pre-existence of a dual system, and since such a system is to be found in Hittite, which in other re- spects preserves archaic features not known to the remaining