# Is neuter the archaic gender for geographic designation?



## Villeggiatura

Both Latin and Greek regularly use neuter form for substantives, including geographic and non-geographic locations, e.g.
barbaricum (foreign land)  neuter of barbaricus
conterminum (neighboring region) neuter of conterminus
cecaumena/κεκαυμένα (burnt regions, torrid zone) neuter plural of κεκαυμένον
heroum/ἡρῷον (heroon) neuter of ἡρῷος
τό φυγαδευτήριον (place of refuge) neuter of φυγαδευτήριος
τὰ ἀρκτῷα (arctic regions) neuter plural of ἀρκτῷος

There are numerous very ancient cities of Magna Graecia and the Latin territory with neuter designations,e.g.
Antium Barium Brundisium Lilybaeum
Metapontum Paestum Regium Tarentum

However, if you survey the placenames of the Greco-Roman world, you'll find the neuter ones are greatly outnumbered by the feminine ones.
For instance, among all the designations of the regions and provinces of the Roman Empire, only a handful are neuter, namely,
Illyricum Latium Noricum Picenum Samnium (official)
Belgium Bruttium Byzacium (unofficial)  
Are they the vestige of an archaic convention?


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## ahvalj

I can't unfortunately comment the Greek and Latin situation, but in East Slavic, which also distinguishes three genders, this aspect of the toponymy is strongly correlated with the gender of the term for the implied kind of locality, especially when the name is grammatically an adjective: e. g., in Russian, as you know, we find _(деревня) Михайловская _(and also the substantival _Михайловка_), but _(село) Михайловское_ and _(город) Михайловск_. When the locality changes its status, so changes the name (at least, this was the rule before the Soviet times). In Old East Slavic, the word _городъ_ was masculine, as in modern Russian, so, when the name was an adjective, it always stood in that gender: _Кыѥвъ, Юриѥвъ, Васильковъ, Козьльскъ, Кѹрьскъ, Смольньскъ, Гѫбинъ, Кашинъ, Микѹлинъ, Изѧславль, Мьстиславль, Ꙗрославль —_ the modern Ukrainian de-Russification policy implies (at least as a suggestion) changing many of the later city names on -_ськ_ into a neuter form in accordance with the contemporary Ukrainian _місто_, e. g. _Лѫчьскъ_>_Луцьк_→_Луцьке_.

In Latin, most tree names were feminine (even when they belonged to the 2nd declension, like _quercus, fāgus, pīnus_) since the trees, which produce fruits/cones, were perceived as women.

Thus, it seems probable that the original IE scheme (well, there were no cities anyway) may have included changing the gender depending on the implied term for the kind of locality — e. g., of the words for "village", *_u̯ikʲs _(> Sanskrit feminine/masculine _viś_, Slavic feminine _vьsь_), *_u̯eı̯kʲos _(> Latin masculine _vīcus_) or *_u̯oı̯kʲos_ (> Greek masculine _ϝοῖκος_) were non-neuter, while *_selom _(> Slavic _selo_) or *_solom_ (> Old High German _sal_) may have been neuter. The Mediterranean tradition, with its numerous cities with substrate names, may have changed that system (since the original invaders that brought Anatolian, Hellenic, Italic, Celtic and Lusitanic languages to the south were, judging from genetics and anthropology, a minority in Anatolia, Greece, Italy and Spain).

*P. S. *As to my latest statement in brackets: it is not the topic of this thread, but since I received concerns from a Greek user twice in the past, I'd like to explain — my understanding is that current anthropology seems to suggest that the original Indo-European speakers inhabited the Pontic–Caspian steppes, left (at some stage) traces in the form of the Yamnaya archeological culture, were predominantly carriers of the R1a haplogroup (http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2015/02/10/013433) and belonged mainly to the anthropological type close to those named East Nordids (http://imagizer.imageshack.us/a/img16/84/eastnordid.png) and North Pontids (http://imagizer.imageshack.us/a/img838/8633/northpontid.png) in this http://s1.zetaboards.com/anthroscape/single/?p=1053323&t=5023745 classification.


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## Villeggiatura

ahvalj said:


> I can't unfortunately comment the Greek and Latin situation, but in East Slavic, which also distinguishes three genders, this aspect of the toponymy is strongly correlated with the gender of the term for the implied kind of locality, especially when the name is grammatically an adjective: e. g., in Russian, as you know, we find _(деревня) Михайловская _(and also the substantival _Михайловка_), but _(село) Михайловское_ and _(город) Михайловск_. When the locality changes its status, so changes the name (at least, this was the rule before the Soviet times). In Old East Slavic, the word _городъ_ was masculine, as in modern Russian, so, when the name was an adjective, it always stood in that gender: _Кыѥвъ, Юриѥвъ, Васильковъ, Козьльскъ, Кѹрьскъ, Смольньскъ, Гѫбинъ, Кашинъ, Микѹлинъ, Изѧславль, Мьстиславль, Ꙗрославль —_ the modern Ukrainian de-Russification policy implies (at least as a suggestion) changing many of the later city names on -_ськ_ into a neuter form in accordance with the contemporary Ukrainian _місто_, e. g. _Лѫчьскъ_>_Луцьк_→_Луцьке_.


The gender agreement is stricter in the cases of _via_, _aqua_, etc; it gets loosened when it comes to settlements like cities. I used to correlate the feminine designation with _urbs/polis_ and the neuter with _oppidum/asty_ until I saw more and more examples of neuter being the gender for substantives in Latin and Greek. To me, neuter seems to be the original and general gender for geographic designation and obsoleted by feminine gender over time (I could be anachronistic).


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## ahvalj

Ancient Celtic, as far as I can judge from this source — _Falileyev AI · 2007 · Dictionary of continental Celtic place-names_ (https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B_7IkEzr9hyJV0NUVGc0ZjE1TlU) — doesn't show any clear preference of gender. Tribal names are universally masculine, however, and compounds tend to inherit the gender of the last noun (_-brigā, -dūnom_). Adjectives on -_āc-_ may belong to all three genders (_Benācos, Bāgācom, Darentiācā_).


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## ahvalj

Villeggiatura said:


> Both Latin and Greek regularly use neuter form for substantives, including geographic and non-geographic locations, e.g.
> barbaricum (foreign land)  neuter of barbaricus
> conterminum (neighboring region) neuter of conterminus
> cecaumena/κεκαυμένα (burnt regions, torrid zone) neuter plural of κεκαυμένον
> heroum/ἡρῷον (heroon) neuter of ἡρῷος
> τό φυγαδευτήριον (place of refuge) neuter of φυγαδευτήριος
> τὰ ἀρκτῷα (arctic regions) neuter plural of ἀρκτῷος


This pattern occurs in Slavic as well, with the suffix *-_iı̯om_>-_ьje_, e. g.:

_*preı̯-moriı̯om>primorьje>приморье_ (= Lithuanian masculine [<neuter ?] _priemaris/priemarys_; though we find a feminine _Aremoricā _in Celtic with a different suffix [the preffix in Gaulish is the same but in a different ablaut grade, *_p°ri_]),
_поморье _(= Lithuanian _pamarys,_ both then from *_hₐpo-moriı̯om_)_, _
_взморье _(= Lithuanian _užmaris, _both from *_ubz-moriı̯om;_ the prefix is a _sandhi_ variant of *_ups _"upwards" [the Lithuanian _ž_ instead of **_z_ must be secondary here, analogous to the one in _iž/iš_ "from" < *_°gʲz/°kʲs_]),
_Подмосковье, Замкадье, _
though this may be interpreted as just a peculiarity of this particular suffix. Czech and Slovak sometimes form country names with the neuter -_sko_ (_Česko, Slovensko, Rusko, Německo, Polsko, Rumunsko_): this seems to be not defined by any implied noun; on the other hand, I am not aware of similar examples in other Slavic languages, including ancient texts (e. g., Polish has _Polska_ in feminine).


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## Kirill V.

ahvalj said:


> Thus, it seems probable that the original IE scheme (well, there were no cities anyway) ...



why would they need such a sophisticated language then?


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## Villeggiatura

ahvalj said:


> Ancient Celtic, as far as I can judge from this source — _Falileyev AI · 2007 · Dictionary of continental Celtic place-names_ (https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B_7IkEzr9hyJV0NUVGc0ZjE1TlU) — doesn't show any clear preference of gender. Tribal names are universally masculine, however, and compounds tend to inherit the gender of the last noun (_-brigā, -dūnom_). Adjectives on -_āc-_ may belong to all three genders (_Benācos, Bāgācom, Darentiācā_).


More on gender agreement:

1. Some proper nouns are consistently addressed with a common noun whose gender defines the proper noun's, e.g.
Via Appia (f.)
Forum Boarium (n.)
Campus Martius(m.)

2. Some can be addressed with or without a common noun (the ones without a common noun are probably the earlier forms); when addressed with a common noun, the proper noun and the common noun agree on gender, e.g.
  Mons Palatinus (m.) / Palatium (n.)
  Provincia Byzacena (f.) / Byzacium (n.)

3. Some can be addressed with or without a common noun; when addressed with a common noun, the two don't agree on gender,
Regio (f.) Samnium (n.)
Regio (f.) Picenum (n.)

4. We know that Rome (f.) is referred to as _urbs_ (f.) where the two agree on gender, and Athens (f.) as τό ἄστυ (n.) where the two don't agree.
Other Greco-Roman cities whose names are either neuter or feminine could be referred to as _polis/urbs _(f.) or _asty/oppidum/municipium_ (n.), we don't know for certain.


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## ahvalj

kayve said:


> why would they need such a sophisticated language then?


Actually, languages of many of the less derived peoples of Eurasia (belonging e. g. to the Altaic, Uralic, Munda and Yenisseic families) are considerably to incomparably more sophisticated grammatically (more nuanced) than modern Indo-European ones, so there seems to be no direct correlation. Languages develop according to their own laws, and details of this development often don't overlap in any perceivable way with the social history of their bearers.

Also, the PIE language (in the form it is reconstructed to date) isn't that nuanced: much of the complexity in the early daughter lineages (e. g. Vedic or Avestan) was caused by the phonetic evolution — in particular, PIE was a language with complicated consonant clusters, which were becoming increasingly difficult to pronounce for the post-PIE speakers, and hence the originally transparent paradigms tended to split into many less related and more complicated ones. Also, the effects caused by the free stress and the vowel reduction (and then by the vowel coloring in vicinity of the laryngeals, and finally by the disappearance of the laryngeals) were very disturbing for the unity of the paradigms: imagine what can happen with the Russian declension and conjugation with its free stress and alternation of unstressed vowels and hard/palatalized consonants in the speech of inhabitants of e. g. Uzbekistan if their Russian is left without contact with the metropole for centuries.


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## apmoy70

Villeggiatura said:


> Both Latin and Greek regularly use neuter form for substantives, including geographic and non-geographic locations, e.g.
> barbaricum (foreign land)  neuter of barbaricus
> conterminum (neighboring region) neuter of conterminus
> cecaumena/κεκαυμένα (burnt regions, torrid zone) neuter plural of κεκαυμένον
> heroum/ἡρῷον (heroon) neuter of ἡρῷος
> τό φυγαδευτήριον (place of refuge) neuter of φυγαδευτήριος
> τὰ ἀρκτῷα (arctic regions) neuter plural of ἀρκτῷος


The Greek words you have posted here are mostly nominalised adjectives (Greek loves to nominalise adjectives) with the noun they qualify, being implied, eg:
Κεκαυμένα (neut. nom. pl.) qualifies the neuter noun ἐδάφη (regions) which is implied.
Idem with the ἀρκτῷα (ἐδάφη is implied).
For the ἡρῷον (neut. nom. sing.) the implied noun is μνημεῖον (monument). The heroic monument.
For the φυγαδευτήριον (neut. nom. sing.) the implied noun could be οἰκητήριον (building, residence)


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## ahvalj

Villeggiatura said:


> More on gender agreement:
> 
> 1. Some proper nouns are consistently addressed with a common noun whose gender defines the proper noun's, e.g.
> Via Appia (f.)
> Forum Boarium (n.)
> Campus Martius(m.)
> 
> 2. Some can be addressed with or without a common noun (the ones without a common noun are probably the earlier forms); when addressed with a common noun, the proper noun and the common noun agree on gender, e.g.
> Mons Palatinus (m.) / Palatium (n.)
> Provincia Byzacena (f.) / Byzacium (n.)
> 
> 3. Some can be addressed with or without a common noun; when addressed with a common noun, the two don't agree on gender,
> Regio (f.) Samnium (n.)
> Regio (f.) Picenum (n.)
> 
> 4. We know that Rome (f.) is referred to as _urbs_ (f.) where the two agree on gender, and Athens (f.) as τό ἄστυ (n.) where the two don't agree.
> Other Greco-Roman cities whose names are either neuter or feminine could be referred to as _polis/urbs _(f.) or _asty/oppidum/municipium_ (n.), we don't know for certain.


Your examples in (2) oppose the adjectives (which imply a governing noun and hence agree in gender) to the separate nouns (which are grammatically independent): _mōns Palātīnus_ vs. _Palātium,_ cp. _Итальянский полуостров_ vs. _Италия_. In (3) we find the apposition of two grammatically independent nouns, like _республика Узбекистан_. So, probably, my original comments should have been formulated more strictly and explicitly point to the situation with the adjectives.

Speaking of Italic provinces, we find _Lātium, Samnium _and _Picēnum_ along with _Etrūria, Apūlia_ and _Campānia, _so no masculine toponym, indeed. In the Greek world, we, however, find _Πόντος.
_
P. S. Overlapping with apmoy70.


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## Kirill V.

ahvalj said:


> Actually, languages of many of the less derived peoples of Eurasia (belonging e. g. to the Altaic, Uralic, Munda and Yenisseic families) are considerably to incomparably more sophisticated grammatically (more nuanced) than modern Indo-European ones, so there seems to be no direct correlation. Languages develop according to their own laws, and details of this development often don't overlap in any perceivable way with the social history of their bearers.
> 
> Also, the PIE language (in the form it is reconstructed to date) isn't that nuanced: much of the complexity in the early daughter lineages (e. g. Vedic or Avestan) was caused by the phonetic evolution — in particular, PIE was a language with complicated consonant clusters, which were becoming increasingly difficult to pronounce for the post-PIE speakers, and hence the originally transparent paradigms tended to split into many less related and more complicated ones. Also, the effects caused by the free stress and the vowel reduction (and then by the vowel coloring in vicinity of the laryngeals, and finally by the disappearance of the laryngeals) were very disturbing for the unity of the paradigms: imagine what can happen with the Russian declension and conjugation with its free stress and alternation of unstressed vowels and hard/palatalized consonants in the speech of inhabitants of e. g. Uzbekistan if their Russian is left without contact with the metropole for centuries.



Alright, so what you are saying is how difficult it's been for us the post-PIE speakers to preserve all the various phonetic and grammatic features of the PIE, so we've been simplifying the language since then to make it easier for us.

However, what has always been making me wonder is why did they have all that complexity in the first place? A complexity that has proven to be so diffilult to maintain. 

Although you say that there is no correlation between the complexity of a language and the level of development of the people who speak it, frankly, I do not buy that. I just can't see why a primitive society / community that only needs to express simple thougths would develop a sophisticated language.
If the only thing you need to say is "_Take a spoon and eat the meat_" you do not need Cases for the nouns involved. Even now one can express that thought in English without putting the nouns involved in any cases. Just verb + Direct Object in Nom. Case seems to be quite enough. One needs sophisticated grammar only to express sophisticated thoughts.


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## Villeggiatura

apmoy70 said:


> The Greek words you have posted here are mostly nominalised adjectives (Greek loves to nominalise adjectives) with the noun they qualify, being implied, eg:
> Κεκαυμένα (neut. nom. pl.) qualifies the neuter noun ἐδάφη (regions) which is implied.
> Idem with the ἀρκτῷα (ἐδάφη is implied).
> For the ἡρῷον (neut. nom. sing.) the implied noun is μνημεῖον (monument). The heroic monument.
> For the φυγαδευτήριον (neut. nom. sing.) the implied noun could be οἰκητήριον (building, residence)


What kind of settlement did the neuter names of the Greek cities (like Βυζάντιον, Μεταπόντιον) initially imply?  Χωρίον, ἄστυ?


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## wtrmute

kayve said:


> Although you say that there is no correlation between the complexity of a language and the level of development of the people who speak it, frankly, I do not buy that. I just can't see why a primitive society / community that only needs to express simple thougths would develop a sophisticated language.
> If the only thing you need to say is "_Take a spoon and eat the meat_" you do not need Cases for the nouns involved. Even now one can express that thought in English without putting the nouns involved in any cases. Just verb + Direct Object in Nom. Case seems to be quite enough. One needs sophisticated grammar only to express sophisticated thoughts.



You may not buy it, but it is a fact.  Take the Algonquian languages, with their polysyntheticism and proximative/obviative distinctions.  Morphologically speaking, they are much more complex than any IE language, and yet the Algonquians were, as a rule, Stone Age hunters/protofarmers, as primitive as you please.

Systems like language evolve by themselves, and don't need a "reason" to acquire or lose features.  A complex morphology obviously didn't hinder the Amerinds, so they kept it.  On the other hand, Classical Chinese has always been exceedingly simple grammatically and morphologically, and they were about the most advanced culture in the world up to 1500 AD.  They, as well, saw no reason to make their grammar more complex, so it remained simple.


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## Villeggiatura

apmoy70 said:


> The Greek words you have posted here are mostly nominalised adjectives (Greek loves to nominalise adjectives) with the noun they qualify, being implied, eg:
> Κεκαυμένα (neut. nom. pl.) qualifies the neuter noun ἐδάφη (regions) which is implied.
> Idem with the ἀρκτῷα (ἐδάφη is implied).
> For the ἡρῷον (neut. nom. sing.) the implied noun is μνημεῖον (monument). The heroic monument.
> For the φυγαδευτήριον (neut. nom. sing.) the implied noun could be οἰκητήριον (building, residence)


οἰκητήριον itself is a neuter nominalization.
I can't help asking why neuter forms are the favorite in all these instances, and why aren't their feminine or masculine counterparts nominalized to imply the feminine or masculine synonyms of ἔδαφος and others (I don't know, like χώρα, τόπος, ναός,  or something else more fitting)?

And the list goes on:
τό ἄσυλον asylum
τό ἐγκώμιον  encomium
τό μυστήριον mysterium
τό πολύσπαστον polyspaston
τό κειμήλιον
τά κρεμαστά
...
I begin to think inanimateness is the original concept for all neuter nominalizations regardless of the genders of the implied ones.


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## ahvalj

I am afraid your question formulated this way has no answer: this choice is governed by some subconscious structures of the language and are hard to grasp even for the native speakers themselves — try to explain why a certain class of nouns prefers one or another gender (e. g. three most active modern Russian suffixes of abstract names are the feminine -_ость_ and the neuter -_ство _and_ -ие, _and their gender goes back to PIE).


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## Villeggiatura

ahvalj said:


> I am afraid your question formulated this way has no answer: this choice is governed by some subconscious structures of the language and are hard to grasp even for the native speakers themselves — try to explain why a certain class of nouns prefers one or another gender (e. g. three most active modern Russian suffixes of abstract names are the feminine -_ость_ and the neuter -_ство _and_ -ие, _and their gender goes back to PIE).


Eons ago, most of (if not all) the inanimate were neuter, then people began to feminize and masculinize them according to their worldviews, and this might be a fantasy
Neuter nouns are largely preserved in some languages, and didn't survive in some, and that's a fact.


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## ahvalj

It's not that simple. The theories of the last 50 years postulate that PIE, at least at its earlier stage, was a language with Active/Stative opposition (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active–stative_language): in this context, the later genders are descendants of the Active and Stative classes, but the original semantics behind that opposition was somewhat different. Anyway, I doubt it can be demonstrably linked with the much later facts you're citing. What we find in the attested languages are rather petrified remnants of the older typology used as building blocks («я его слепила из того, что было»).


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## berndf

Villeggiatura said:


> Eons ago, most of (if not all) the inanimate were neuter, then people began to feminize and masculinize them according to their worldviews, and this might be a fantasy
> Neuter nouns are largely preserved in some languages, and didn't survive in some, and that's a fact.


It's a bit more complicated than that. The most popular theory is that Pre-PIE distinguished two genders that you could label _animate_ and _inanimate_ though this would be a rather modernistic interpretation of those two genders. The inanimate gender had two plurals, an individual one and a collective one. The collective plural became the feminine gender and the animate gender became the masculine gender.

The main reasons for this assumption is 1) that Hittite, a language that presumably spawn off from PIE very early, before the three gender system had been established, still shows these two genders, animate and inanimate and 2) the the feminine singular is phonologically very similar to the neuter plural in Greek and and Latin and that the Greek neuter plural regularly took singular verbs.

EDIT: Crossed with #17.


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## ahvalj

By the way, the reduction of the number of genders in later IE languages seems to be conditioned mostly by casual morphological circumstances. The neuter differed from the masculine and feminine only in the Nom. and Acc. If, for phonetic reasons, the distinction was lost (e. g. in Romance the generalized Acc. Sg. masculine became identical with the Nom./Acc. neuter:_ albus/alba/album > albu/alba/albu; _in East Baltic the Nom. Sg. of the _ā_-declension merged with the Nom./Acc. neuter of the _a_-type, except for the stress, e. g. *_baltas/baltā/balta_ > _baltas/balta/balta_), the neuter became endangered. In Scandinavian, in contrast, the neuter adjectives were characterized by the characteristic -_t_ (eventually from the PIE pronominal *-_d _in _tod _"that"_ etc._), so that Swedish and Danish merged the masculine and feminine but preserved the neuter: _hvítr/hvít/hvítt_ > _vit/vit/vitt. _The languages that preserved (like Greek, _λευκός/λευκή/λευκό_, and Slavic, _белый/белая/белое_) or introduced (like German: _weißer/weiße/weißes_) distinct adjectival endings, have preserved the three genders intact.


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## berndf

ahvalj said:


> The languages that preserved (like Greek, _λευκός/λευκή/λευκό_, and Slavic, _белый/белая/белое_) or *introduced *(like German: _weißer/weiße/weißes_) distinct adjectival endings


"Introduced"? Can you be more specific?


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## ahvalj

berndf said:


> "Introduced"? Can you be more specific?


Gothic strong adjectives show double forms in some cases, namely inherited _ƕeits/ƕeita/ƕeit_ (<*_kʲu̯eı̯tos/kʲu̯eı̯tā/kʲu̯eı̯tom_) and extended with pronominal endings, like Nom./Acc. Sg. _ƕeitata_ (after þata _"that"). _In most languages this penetration was rather limited, but Old High German was the most consistent in this respect: _weiȥ/weiȥe/weiȥ_ along with _weiȥêr/weiȥiu/weiȥaȥ_ after _der/diu/daȥ_.


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## berndf

ahvalj said:


> Gothic strong adjectives show double forms in some cases, namely inherited _ƕeits/ƕeita/ƕeit_ (<*_kʲu̯eı̯tos/kʲu̯eı̯tā/kʲu̯eı̯tom_) and extended with pronominal endings, like Nom./Acc. Sg. _ƕeitata_ (after þata _"that"). _In most languages this penetration was rather limited, but Old High German was the most consistent in this respect: _weiȥ/weiȥe/weiȥ_ along with _weiȥêr/weiȥiu/weiȥaȥ_ after _der/diu/daȥ_.


The weak inflection is an innovation but _weißer/weiße/weißes _is strong and not weak and has clearly developed out of the PIE thematic declension and is not an innovation.

The weak inflection is a conceptual and not just a morphological innovation, i.e. a definiteness marker and has probably developed out of the individualizing suffix _*-on_, cf. e.g. Latin _Cato, -onis = the wise one_ from _catus = wise_.


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## ahvalj

Could you sketch how you see the PIE source of _-êr/-iu/-aȥ _?


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## berndf

Of the top of my head: _-er_ is from _-êr_ (Middle High German weakening of of ending vowels) is from _-ar_ is from from PG _-az_ (Grammatischer Wechsel) is from PIE _-os/-as_.

PS: I think you can read German, so this may interest you: https://books.google.de/books?id=NCfsJh2hDigC&lpg=PA73&ots=jcTBg0jR2t&dq=protogermanische adjektiv&hl=de&pg=PA73#v=onepage&q=protogermanische adjektiv&f=false


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## ahvalj

(1) this -_êr_ is long;
(2) -_z>-r_ is dropped in all non-monosyllabic words (Nom. Sg. _tag,_ Nom. Pl. _taga_, Gen. Sg. _ȥala, _Nom./Acc. Pl. _ȥalâ,_ Nom. Sg. _gast,_ Nom./Acc. Pl. _gesti,_ Nom. Sg. _fridu, _Nom./Acc. Pl. _bruoder, _Gen. Sg. _namin/namen,_ Nom./Acc. Pl. _namon/namun,_ Gen. Sg. _ȥungûn,_ Nom./Acc. Pl._ ȥungûn, _Nom. Sg. _weiȥ,_ Acc. Pl. _weiȥe, _Praet. Sg. 2 _nâmi_).

If we look at the paradigm, we'll find more obviously pronominal endings, e. g. Dat. Sg. m/n_ weiȥemu, _Gen. Sg. f _weiȥera, _Gen. Pl. m/n/f_ weiȥero. _The Acc. Sg. m _weiȥan _(Gothic _ƕeitana_) also can't be original since the inherited *-_n_ was lost a millenium before (Acc. Sg. _wolf,_ Nom./Acc. Sg. _wort, _Acc. Sg. _ȥala, _Acc. Sg. _gast, _Acc. Sg._ fridu, _Acc. Sg. _bruoder, _Infin. _beran_).


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## berndf

ahvalj said:


> (1) this -_êr_ is long;


Yes, I had realized the missing step. I had added it above, probably after you wrote that.


ahvalj said:


> -_z>-r_ is dropped in all non-monosyllabic words


In nouns. That is a general development in West-Germanic. Other older Germanic languages still had the reflex of the nominative _-s_, e.g. ON _dag*r* _(_day_), again with the typical development _-s>-z>-r_.

I see no reason to regard the German adjective declension system as something completely distinct from its PGrm origins which had the inherited strong inflection system with a decay of classes plus a newly formed weak system.


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## berndf

ahvalj said:


> If we look at the paradigm, we'll find more obviously pronominal endings, e. g. Dat. Sg. m/n_ weiȥemu, _Gen. Sg. f _weiȥera, _Gen. Pl. m/n/f_ weiȥero. _The Acc. Sg. m _weiȥan _(Gothic _ƕeitana_) also can't be original since the inherited *-_n_ was lost a millenium before (Acc. Sg. _wolf,_ Nom./Acc. Sg. _wort, _Acc. Sg. _ȥala, _Acc. Sg. _gast, _Acc. Sg._ fridu, _Acc. Sg. _bruoder, _Infin. _beran_).


If your point is that the Germanic strong declension is a bastard of different paradigms then I agree with you. But I wouldn't call this innovation but suppletion. Maybe it's just terminology and not substance that is between us. By contrast, the weak declension is surely an innovation although it uses existing morphemes.


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