Gender theory question

[pozorvlak]

Gender-theory kru, your attention please:

I came across the following recently, and wondered if any of you might have some idea of its source:

Gender is not like some of the other grammatical modes which express precisely a mode of conception without any reality that corresponds to the conceptual mode, and consequently do not express precisely something in reality by which the intellect could be moved to conceive a thing the way it does, even where that motive is not something in the thing as such.

Any thoughts? And can someone tell me what it means?

Comments

[pozorvlak.livejournal.com]

There's also the issue that we don't know which language the original piece was in - based on the complexity of the sentence structure, I think it may well have been written in a highly inflected language (which would therefore probably have grammatical gender).

I believe Proto-Indo-European had two genders, active and neuter, which corresponded roughly to things which can act (people, animals, gods, etc) and things which can only be acted upon (rocks, houses, trees, etc). At some point this split further into three genders, then recombined, resplit, and so on.

[half-of-monty.livejournal.com]

Oh that's interesting.