1898-99. | THE ORIGIN OF GENDER. 61 
PE err Gal IN ©: EGON DER. 
BY ERor, AS]: BELLE, PED: 
(Read February 12th, 1898.) 
“THE foundation of grammatical gender is the natural distinction 
between the sexes in mankind and animals” is Hermann Paul’s 
judgment on this question, a judgment representing the views of the 
dominant school of grammarians, and one which will, moreover, be 
accepted as natural by anyone who is acquainted only with the 
phenomena presented by grammatical gender, as it is found in English. 
And indeed,an Englishman, who has in mind the distinction, as it exists 
in his own language, will be inclined to wonder how any question can 
arise about the matter, and to regard the origin of the distinction as 
evident. This is because in English the use of grammatical gender has 
been to a great extent discarded, and is retained mainly for pronouns. 
The agreement of adjectives, that represents the high-water mark of its 
development, has quite disappeared, and in consequence with regard to 
nouns the question of their gender rarely arises, and it is usually only 
when we wish to substitute a pronoun for a noun, that this grammatical 
distinction claims our attention. Even then in making the distinction 
we follow pretty closely the lines of natural sex when persons are in 
question, using the masculine pronoun fe for males and the feminine 
she for females, though there is a tendency to regard names of children 
as neuter, z.¢., to disregard the distinction of sex entirely when speaking 
of them. With regard to lower animals the distinction is usually disre- 
garded, and when lifeless objects are in question, it is usually poets that 
venture to apply to them the masculine and feminine pronouns, while 
personifying them in a way that is, as a rule, quite arbitrary, though at 
times there appear some traces of a connection with an older state of 
things. So when the poet makes the sun masculine and the moon 
feminine, he is probably influenced, consciously or unconsciously, by the 
tradition of the sun god Apollo and the moon goddess Diana; and when 
a ship is regarded as feminine, which is commonly the case, the poet is 
following an old grammatical distinction which can be traced back to 
the primitive language of the Indo-European people. But this personi- 
fication is usually governed by ideas that are entirely independent of the 
grammatical distinction of gender as it exists in the older forms of our 
