GENDER AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE GREEK DECLENSIONS

GREEK DECLENSIONS By ANNA MORPURUO DAVIES IN ancient Greek the only comprehensive definition of gender is syntactical, namely, concord with special forms of the adjective or anaphorical pronouns, and, in classical Greek, of the artic1e.l In a number of cases, where natural and grammatical gender overlap, a semantic element must also be taken into consideration : thus wanjp ' father' is masculine, but pFL7jvp ' mother ' is feminine. Often enough a special derivational su& is sufficient to indicate the gender of the substantive: e.g. all words formed with the su& -aare masculine, whatever their semantic reference may be : /3aochr& ' king ', l p rds ' priest ', Ap&+oprds ' amphora ', etc. Finally, inflectional elements may play a role in gender distinction. From this point of view, however, the three genders fall into two different groups : masc. and fem. on one side, neuter on the other side. All neuter nouns and adjectives have the same form, which is usually peculiar to them, for the nominative, accusative and vocative of all three numbers. This is obviously an inherited feature which continues without alteration throughout the whole history of Greek, from ancient times to nowadays. The position of the masc. and fem. is different : there is no inflectional feature in the declensions of rarrjp and p j r q p to indicate that the one word is masc. and the other fern. In fact, a t least two of the three inflectional types normally recognized in Greek, the so called second and third declensions, include both masculines and feminines : bd@os, Gen. bd/3Sov is fem., but T ~ T O S , Gen. r&ou is masc. ; ~TTOS, Gen. ~ T T O V may be used with the same inflection both 'as masc. and as fem., according to the semantic referent ;