Selected Papers from the Fourteenth International ... - STIBA Malang

. Second type of gender deviance: semantic perspective
Gender assignment in Old English 9
Effective as it might appear, the predominance of referential gender over lexical
gender cannot account for the second type of gender deviance in Old English,
where the same lexemes or groups of etymologically and formally related words
show different genders completely unrelated to the natural gender of their referents.
Although less frequent, this phenomenon is intriguing, especially because it
is found in Proto-Indo-European and all the other Old Germanic languages.
This type of gender variation concerns cases such as the triad lig (m.) – liget
(n.) – ligetu (f.) or the pair list (f.) – list (m.), where there seems to be no semantic
difference in correspondence to gender fluctuation. Looking directly at their textual
occurrences, however, it is possible to discern a slight, but consistent variation
in meaning. Substantially, although, for instance, lig (m.) – liget (n.) – ligetu (f.) are
all related to the idea of ‘fire’, not all of them express ‘fire’: lig (m.) appears to refer to
‘flame’, whereas liget (n.) specifically means ‘fire’ and ligetu (f.) denotes ‘lightening’.
Similar differentiation of meanings turns up in pairs like tungol (n.) – tungol (m.),
where the noun, if masculine, denominates the single items, i.e., ‘star, planet’, that
constitute the entity, i.e., ‘constellation, firmament’, referred to by the same noun
but in neuter gender. The alternation may involve both animate genders: for example,
leod (f.) ‘people, nation’ – leod (m.) ‘man’, mircels (f.) ‘seal’ – mircels (m.) ‘mark’,
list (f.) ‘cleverness, art’ – list (m.) ‘skill’, or traht (f.) ‘exposition, treatise’ – traht (m.)
‘passage’. Here, again, the masculine gender turns out to express a single example of
the general concept, whereas the feminine expresses a collective view. 12
This linguistic fact is observable in other Old Germanic languages: in Old Norse
(Gordon 1988) grunnr (m.) means ‘ground or sea floor, bottom’ whereas grunn (n.)
indicates ‘shallows’ and grund (f.) a ‘grassy area, ground’; in Old High German
(Leiss 2003) luft may have different meanings, namely luft (f.) ‘sky’, luft (m.) ‘gentle
breeze’ and luft (n.) ‘air’ or felis (m.) ‘piece of rock’ and felisa (f.) ‘rock as substance’.
Such correspondence between different genders and different meanings was
not unknown in the old stages of Indo-European languages: it was already noticed
by Schmidt (1889) and Brugmann (1889) who related it to the origin of grammatical
gender in Indo-European. In this line of arguing, Delbrück (1893: 117) claimed
that “Die häufige Doppelgeschlechtigkeit dürfte sich darus erklären, dass in der
Urzeit der Prozess der Nachahmung noch nicht derart abgeschlossen war, dass
für jedes Wort ein festes Geschlecht bestimmt gewesen wäre.” Hence, instability
1 . Here, we are not confronted with such cases as those cross-linguistically observed where
different genders correspond to different meanings. In Ojibwa mettik means ‘tree’ and is animate,
or it can mean ‘piece of wood’ and is then inanimate (Bloomfield 1957: 31–2). In the Old English
instance, there is only one ‘idea’, but different perspectives from which it is conceptualised.