Gender in Indo-European (review)

This book takes a fresh look at the development of gender in Early and Late Proto-Indo-European. Matasović reduces the diachronic picture to a few basic facts, while also making informed comparisons with non-Indo-European (IE) languages. Early Proto-IE appears to reveal a binary noun-class opposition between a common gender and a neuter gender, with the feminine arising only later. M speculates that this opposition arose based on the dichotomy between count and mass nouns. At the same time, he finds that the semantic core of gender distinctions in IE at all demonstrable stages revolved around notions of animate/inanimate and male/female; this distinguishes Eurasian noun-class systems from the shape-based systems found in Sub-Saharan Africa. Finally, M claims that gender as a grammatical feature is remarkably stable, disappearing only under the influence of significant areal interaction with genderless languages. However, one could argue that such cases are sufficiently large in number to suggest that gender as a category is not especially resistant to change, since contact-induced effects are by no means an unusual phenomenon. M cites Swedish in Finland as an example of gender loss, as well as the case of Armenian and Persian. He also mentions the rise of gender in Eastern Nilotic (27). All of this ultimately begs the question of whether gender in Early Proto-IE was affected by language contact or developed through purely language-internal changes, a question that M does not answer. M is probably wise to avoid speculating on whether Early Proto-IE gender reflects active/stative typological alignment. He also leaves open the issue of what evidence from gender typology might eventually reveal about deeper genetic connections between IE and the genderless languages of northeastern Eurasia sometimes held to belong, alongside IE, to a broader Nostratic or Eurasiatic family. The most interesting aspects of the book thus turn out to be the author’s educated speculations on these questions.

A brief overview of gender in each of the family’s daughter branches is also included (33–77), but the focus is predominantly diachronic, so readers interested in the system of gender distribution in the modern languages will find little of novel interest here. Most of the data appear instead in the form of lexical reconstructions.

M entertains a full range of possible solutions to perennial problems in reconstructing gender-related phenomena, yet remains guarded in his own judgments. He also examines only reliably reconstructible nouns and avoids basing any of his judgments on speculative data.

Another feature that sets this book apart is the author’s wide-ranging attention to gender systems outside of IE itself. M’s comparisons with noun classes or the lack thereof in other families of Eurasia is typologically illuminating, as they provide a fresh external point of reference from which to assess IE gender. Inclusion of data from the most recent cross-linguistic studies of noun-class phenomena lends more weight to his conclusions.

This book significantly clarifies the probable stages of development of gender in IE and also provides an authoritative basis for comparison with other Eurasian language families, something that is important for future areal as well as genetic investigations.