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Or learn Hittite. It's got the oldest corpus in the Indo-European language family. You've got your standard assortment of Indo-European cases. Grammatical gende
by wl 2mo ago
Or learn Hittite. It's got the oldest corpus in the Indo-European language family. You've got your standard assortment of Indo-European cases. Grammatical gender is animate/inanimate and the animate gender has yet to split into masculine and feminine. The script is tons of fun, especially if you write it with a stylus on clay. And as a bonus, you get to learn a smattering of Sumerian and Akkadian vocabulary.
- rubberpoliceman 2mo agoAnimate gender didn’t split into masculine and feminine — inanimate collective plural was repurposed as feminine.
- NonHyloMorph 2mo agoCan you point us somewhere zo learn more about that?
- wl 2mo agoThat "repurposing" is more morphology than grammar. You also frequently find in Indo-European languages multiple cases having overlapping morphology, but that doesn't necessarily change the cases themselves. My point, in any case, is that Hittite has the older animate/inanimate genders from Proto-Indo-European (only attested in the Anatolian languages!) whereas Sanskrit has the later masculine/feminine/neuter genders.