The Evolution of Gender in English: From Proto-Indo-European to Modern English through Old and Middle English

In this work we will see how gender has changed during the centuries, starting out with the reconstructed Proto-Indo-European animate vs. inanimate opposition (somewhat describable as “masculine+feminine” vs. “neuter”). Then, the emergence of a third gender (namely feminine) led to a rearrangement of the system, switching to a three-gender one: we are talking now of grammatical gender, which was the way Old English chose to use. The subsequent inexorable loss of morphology (together with other factors, as we will see later) led to another resetting of the criterion: already Middle English shows to adopt natural gender, which is what Modern English uses. And the transformations are still ongoing. . .Final paper for the Filologia Germanica 1 course [LM0350] held by Prof. Marina Buzzoni at Ca' Foscari University, Venice (Italy