Page:Nature and Origin of the Noun Genders of the Indo-European Languages.djvu/21

basis of some definite signification. The Germans, for example, call -chen and -lein diminutive suffixes, and, in fact, every German understands by söhnchen and söhnlein a small son. So in English booklet is a small book, or lambkin is a little lamb. Nowhere, however, in the Indo-European languages can it be proved that, for example, the Indo-European "feminine suffix" -ā, as it appears to-day in Lithuanian and Russian, e. g., Lithuanian rankà, Russian ruká, 'hand', and as the Romans had it in anima, casa, fuga, the Greeks in χώρᾱ, 'land', οἰκία, 'house', calls up, or has called up in any degree, the idea of female or of any especially feminine characteristic. And how can any one prove that it was different in the primitive community, when there must have been hundreds of substantives in -ā- which did not signify living beings? Among these, too, there must have been many that denoted concepts which were in no sense concrete, but purely abstract, as, for example, *qṷoinā, 'recompense ', from which comes Avestan kaēna, Greek ποινή, Old Church Slavonic cěna. That the formal gender in our Indo-European languages for thousands of years was not connected with the idea of the masculine or feminine, is shown by quite unmistakable evidence. I will call attention