72 TRANSACTIONS OF THE CANADIAN INSTITUTE. [Voy. VI. 
at times lower objects as well, and having from two to six genders. It is 
interesting to see how feminines are developed in these groups. The 
development begins with adjectives and pronouns, extending to the 
verb, as arule, before the noun is affected in any way. In the languages 
of America and Asia the division into masculines and feminines, where 
it appears, does not include all or even a considerable proportion of 
the nouns in the language, nor does it supersede the older division into 
higher and lower, or as Winkler is inclined to call it, living and lifeless, 
with what propriety will be seen when we recall that names of women 
usually belong to this so-called lifeless sex. But in Africa the older 
state of affairs is superseded by the new, and to the division found in the 
Fulde language, where grown men are opposed to all other objects, 
succeeds a division into masculines and feminines, neuters disappearing 
entirely. How this takes place seems apparent from Hottentot, where 
lifeless objects may remain without gender, or may be transferred to the 
masculine or feminine according as they are strong or weak. For 
example, ¢seb, m., is a great day, ¢ses, f., an ordinary day, while ¢sez, the 
older and indifferent form, isa day. Soin the language of [l-Oigob, 
ol-alem is a large knife, ex-alem is a small knife, o/ being the ordinary 
sign of the masculine and ez of the feminine in this language. The 
Hamitic and Semitic languages, in which no trace of the neuter 
gender remains, seem to represent the highest point of this development. 
All these languages begin to distinguish masculines and feminines 
in the adjective, the pronoun and the verb, and the distinction is 
evidently one that appears late and is superimposed-on the older 
division, which in Hamiticand Semitic it supersedes entirely. In Indo- 
European languages, on the other hand, the division evidently began 
with nouns, for personal pronouns have originally no inflection for 
gender, and accordingly we find no such distinction in the verb, where 
the personal endings are pronominal in origin. The division into 
masculine and feminine does not compete with or supersede the older 
division, but the new feminine gender develops naturally out of the old 
division, the a feminines, the oldest form, representing a special use of 
the so-called neuter plural in a. 
The relation between neuter plurals in a and feminine singulars in @ 
has been investigated by Johannes Schmitt in his Pluralbildungen der 
Indo-Germanischen Neutra,* and Brugmann is strongly inclined to 
approve his theory, admitting that no difference in form can be found 
between the feminine singular ending a and the neuter plural ending a. 
It is a question how far this ending is really plural, for it takes a singular 
*Weimar, 1889. 
