Ide. The Origin of Grammatical Gender

University of Illinois Press, The Journal of Germanic Philology, Vol. 2, No. 4, 1899. — 19 pages.The theory of Indo-Europ. noun-gender was formulated by Adelung, Grimm, and Pott, and first suggested by Humboldt and Herder. It represented gender as due to the personifying instinct of primitive man. Natural objects were viewed as persons, and, as sex afforded the most prominent characterization and classification of persons, objects were not only personified, but also freely sexualized. Grammatical gender as a classification of word-forms is then a conventionalized, crystallized resultant of this primitive sexualization.