The Decline and Fall of the Latin Neuter

Interesting. I didn't mean it as a gotcha, just another example of the phenomenon under discussion. Maybe the "surprised the article didn't mention" formulation is not the way to go.

Is there a good explanation for how these came to develop?

I've heard it explained by saying that "they're typically men's spheres" as rationale from my brief exposure to the language, but this seems deeply unsatisfying for a variety of reasons - id est, in comparison to something along the lines of loanword/archaism/evolution of root/evolution of grammatic gender.

> The article notes that proto-indo-european only had animate and inanimate and that is not the same as gender. Animate here is "alive". A human and a tree are animate but a rock is inanimate. Rocks (outside of Terry Pratchett books do not procreate).

Baseless speculation: I think I can see how gender might develop out of this paradigm. Far as I remember, there's the sky father and earth mother, and the sky impregnates the earth to create life. The animate/active is associated with the masculine, and the inanimate/passive with the feminine.

I've read a little about alchemy and the various ways one might determine the elemental nature of a thing, and this process was much more involved than one might expect, leading to a variety of interesting conclusions. I can imagine something similar behind the genders of things, at least at the beginning.

> I know Russian isn't a Romance language, but it is Indo-European in origin, and I was wondering if maybe there was some parallel process that ended differently there.

The phenomenon this article talks about seems specific to Latin:

> To trace the decline of the neuter, we can begin with a theoretical principle: the process must have begun early, at a time when Latin was still a unified language. If we do not accept this as a first premise, it becomes very difficult to explain why the neuter is absent from the whole Romance family – why its decline was so uniform. This is not to say that the neuter had died completely when Romance languages first emerged, only that the seeds had already been sown and the die already cast.

Though I suppose your observation that Russian (and I think other Indo-European languages) still have the neuter gender kinda confirms that.

Yes, the expressions “moving” – “not-moving” are rather misleading.

The actual distinction according to this theory (or to my favourite flavour of this theory) was: “able to act willfully” – “unable to act willfully”. The distinction was quite logical. Cp.:

(A) “Susan runs down the hill.”

(B) “Water runs down the hill.”

(C) “Susan drinks water.”

A speaker of Proto-Indo-European might have said, learning English: “This is strange – as if these were somehow the same acts or events. ‘Susan runs’, OK, but water does not run – it is dragged down. It does not act, something happens to it.” (And then the PIE-speaker might have speculated that anglophone people have an animistic worldview or so.)

In PIE the subject of a sentence seems to have denoted an actual agens; and there seems to have been a class of nouns for things unable to act willfully, hence unable to be the subject. So that the subject in (A) and (C) would have been a subject in the nominative, denoting an agens, whereas in (B) “water” would not have been seen as subject; the sentence would have been constructed differently and “water” would have been put in the same case as “water” in (C).

Because all over the old IE languages, neuter nouns have the same form for the nominative and the accusative, and it seems to have been rather the form for the accusative: Cp.

Latin masc. nom. sg. ‑us

Latin masc. acc. sg. ‑um

Latin neutr. nom. sg. ‑um

Latin neutr. acc. sg. ‑um

There is further evidence, too.

In principle, the distinction was quite logical, but its application is difficult and gets easily messed up over time until the old semantic distinction has become a mere formal one.