MORE ON ThE ORIGIN

1 The debate about whether or not hittite ever had the feminine gender also remains lively. Melchert (1994) very recently asserts that there is evidence for a feminine in Anatolian in the form of a “motion suffix ”-i- added to common gender nouns in Luvian and perhaps some adjec-tives in hittite. however, as Matasović (2004: 39) significantly observes, “a major indication that Anatolian actually never had the third gender comes from typology. It has been observed that, when gender distinctions are lost, their traces are almost always preserved in demonstrative pro-nouns, if anywhere in the language …. Thus, if there were any traces of the feminine gender in Anatolian, one would expect them to be preserved in the pronominal system, rather than in adjectives and nouns, where their potential functional load would have been minimal.” 2 Still another very recent attempt to explain the origin of the feminine category is contained in Gender in indo-eurpean (2004), by Ranko Matasović. Although Matasović does not cite my scholarship, his view of the origin of the feminine (cf. 2004: 173–176) is essentially the one which I have proposed in Shields (1995). Nevertheless, this new book of his demonstrates once again the continued interest of Indo-Europeanists in this topic. Other recent studies of Indo-European gender include Euler (1991)