Rosemarie Lühr: Gender agreement in Indo-European

Hittite shows that the ”genericum”, as a noun referring to people underspecified for gender, is a typical case where the need for a special gender marker for the feminine sexus can arise in a language. If a language has three genders like German the ”genericum ” is the masculine in Indo-European, if it has two genders like Hittite with common gender and neuter the “genericum ” is the common gender. When looking for ”generica ” and corresponding feminines in other Indo-European languages from synchronic perspective, primarily the productive inflection types and word formation patterns come into question. However, in Vedic the nominal a- and ā-stems are no candidates for this. At best one can find animal terms that could point to a ”genericum”: (1) ajá- ’he-goat ‘ aj-ā́- ‘goat‘ áśva- ’horse ‘ áśv-ā- ‘mare‘ Probably there are so few a- and ā-stems designations for creatures of the masculine and feminine sexus in the Rigveda, because the suffixes-a- and-ā were not used as means of word formation anymore in Vedic Sanskrit but as indicators of inflection and agreement markers for pronouns and adjectives. The question of how this could have taken place ha