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by fourtrees 1698 days ago
Having missed your comment, I was about to post about this. One interesting fact I can add is that Hittite, the oldest written IE language, has the animate/inanimate gender system rather than the 3-way system. You can also see remnants of the old system here and there in Latin, Greek, Sanskrit, Russian, ect.

Of course, this is largely theoretical like you said, and I'm sure you could dig up some dissenting papers if you wanted to.
1 comments
kgeist 1698 days ago
>You can also see remnants of the old system here and there in Latin, Greek, Sanskrit, Russian, ect.

For example, there are some adjectives in Latin and Ancient Greek, which only have two declensions instead of three: one common declension for masculine/feminine, and one for neuter.

For example: naturalis (masc), naturalis (fem), naturale (neut), as opposed to novus (masc), nova (fem), novum (neut).

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