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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 25 March 2020
As we noted in Chapter 2, the very earliest known form of Proto-Indo-European had only two grammatical genders: Fortson (2010: 114) tells us that ‘the oldest preserved branch of Indo-European, Anatolian, had only a two-way distinction between animate or common gender and inanimate or neuter’. According to Ringe (2006: 24), however, all the extant modern Indo-European varieties descend from the non-Anatolian branch of Proto-Indo-European, which he calls North Indo-European, which represents a more complex and innovative stage of Proto-Indo-European in which, at some point after 4200 bc, ‘a three-way contrast in grammatical gender between masculine, feminine, and neuter’ (Fortson 2010: 114) had developed. It is widely agreed that the innovation which gave rise to the new tripartite system was precisely the development of the new feminine gender.
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