L'origine déictique du genre féminin en indo-européen

International audienceDiscussion of the previous theories concerning the origin of feminine gender in Indo-European. It is generally assumed that Proto-Indo-European had only animate and non-animate genders, then no specific feminine. This situation is still reflected by Anatolian, while most other ancient Indo-European languages have three genders, masculine, feminine and neuter (=non-animate). The paper refutes the attempts to identify the morpheme *-(e)h2 of the feminine with the collective suffix *-h2, reflected later as the ending of neuter plurals. Instead, the point of departure would be the metanalysis of a demonstrative deictic form, which used originally the adverbial ending *-eh2, expressing the allative or directive