The Third Gender

The Third Gender treats the history and development of grammatical gender from Indo-European to Germanic and into the daughter languages. Grammatical gender has hitherto received only peripheral attention in histories of the Germanic languages. This relative neglect is unfortunate, for this nominal category holds the key to understanding the massive transformations that have occurred in the nominal systems of all the Indo-European languages, which Schwink claims are in considerable part due to problems arising out of the innovation of a "third" gender, a feminine, disturbing the earlier classification of nouns into animate and inanimate. Gender offers clear evidence that Germanic represents an extremely archaic form of Indo-European. And understanding gender in a historical perspective allows us to draw together such disparate developments as found in Modern English, German, and Dutch and to show their essential similarity and relatedness.