पृष्ठम्:The Sanskrit Language (T.Burrow).djvu/२११

विकिस्रोतः तः
एतत् पृष्ठम् अपरिष्कृतम् अस्ति

THE FORMATION OF NOUNS 205 nauta, agricola , etc., O. SL sluga 'servant', vojevoda 'army commander ' which are in no way formally differentiated from feminines. Greek also has such masculine a-stems, but has differentiated them on its own by adding ~s in the nom. sg. (ttoit/ttJs*, etc.). In Sanskrit this type has become obsolete like that of the feminine o-stems. On the other hand there remain a number of masculines formed with the compound suffix -I (-i-H) which functions side by side with d in the formation of feminines. Skt, rathi - * charioteer ' is a survival from the time when adjectival -% was indifferent to gender, before it became specialised as a feminine suffix. In Italic and Celtic this adjec- tival -I, by an easy change of syntactical function, was adapted to form the genitive singular of o-stems [eqm stands to equus as rathi- to rdtha-). The existence of these common masc.-fem. formations so abundantly in Sanskrit and other IE languages, together with the twofold system of Hittite which shows no trace of a fem- inine gender, is capable of only one explanation. An older dual system has been replaced by a threefold classification into genders. The old system is preserved in its entirety in Hittite ; in Sanskrit and other languages it is still partly preserved, as the above examples show, but in the main it has been replaced by the threefold system. The process of this development cannot be followed in detail since it lies in the prehistory of the languages concerned. All that can be said is that at some period of later Indo-European the suffix d {-an) together with the compound suffixes l (-1-11) and u (-w-h) came to be specialised as feminine suffixes. This must have applied first to these suffixes in their adjectival use be- ginning possibly with a small nucleus of words'which happened to possess this suffix and were feminine by meaning (e.g. Skt. gnd , Gk. yvvrj). The suffixes so hsed are either an addition to the primary adjectival suffix {raj fit) or in the case of thematic stems a substitution for it {ndwosjndwd). The nature of the earlier dual system has been made suf- ficiently clear in dealing with the individual suffixes above. The words of f common gender ’ from which masculine and feminine nouns eventually derive are in origin adjectives or, what from the point of view of early Indo-European is the same thing, agent nouns. The fundamental division is the one repre- sented on the one hand by Gk. vBcop 1 water Hitt, arkuwar