Reconstruction talk:Proto-Celtic/mlastos
Add topicLatest comment: 4 months ago by Mahagaja in topic Gender
Gender
[edit]As me and @Mahagaja went over on *boudi already, Brittonic is not very reliable for reconstructing a Proto-Celtic word's masculine gender when the neuter gender is an open possibility, because Brittonic languages lost the neuter. Abstracts from verbal roots ending in *-tom n also occur in *ɸratom and *mratom (both of these of course have masculine Welsh cognates). We cannot be sure "taste" was masculine. — Ceso femmuin mbolgaig mbung, mellohi! (投稿) 20:15, 25 July 2024 (UTC)
- The two situations are totally different. In this case, the only gender we have is the masculine, and though it is true that it could have been originally a neuter, the best evidence we have is for a masculine. The alternative reconstructions section is made exactly for cases like this. And to you point on PC *-tom, all the sources suppose an original PIE formation, and that being the case, those are formed from *-tós adjectives nominalized to masculine o-grade nouns. --
{{victar|talk}}21:30, 25 July 2024 (UTC)- @Victar: The only thing the Brittonic and post-OIr. genders can tell us is that it was not feminine. Whether it was masculine or neuter originally is unknowable based on the post-neuter-loss genders. Only Old Irish can give this information, and in this specific case Old Irish still does not divulge this information. The only other way to tell the gender is to see if it fits a formation of known gender, which based on *ɸratom and *mratom, (which, BTW, also have all-masculine descendants except in Old Irish!) still cannot confirm its masculinity. — Ceso femmuin mbolgaig mbung, mellohi! (投稿) 22:29, 25 July 2024 (UTC)
- Re: "those are formed from *-tós adjectives nominalized to masculine o-grade nouns", all three of the nouns we just talked about were derived from the zero grades of roots, I do not see how the o-grade masculine formation is relevant here. — Ceso femmuin mbolgaig mbung, mellohi! (投稿) 22:45, 25 July 2024 (UTC)
- Reconstructions are a game of probability -- you reconstruct what is most probable, there is no "confirmed" -- and this case, the odds point to a masculine noun. The point I was making with PIE *-tós adjectives is that if this was formed in PIE, as the sources propose, it's going to be most likely from *ml̥s-tó-s. In your examples, those are built on known verbs within PC, but we have no evidence of such a verb in this case. --
{{victar|talk}}23:26, 25 July 2024 (UTC)- Overall we are agreeing to disagree about what those odds are. I believe it would be a coin flip between masculine or neuter, you don't think the coin flip exists. — Ceso femmuin mbolgaig mbung, mellohi! (投稿) 23:38, 25 July 2024 (UTC)
- Reconstructions are a game of probability -- you reconstruct what is most probable, there is no "confirmed" -- and this case, the odds point to a masculine noun. The point I was making with PIE *-tós adjectives is that if this was formed in PIE, as the sources propose, it's going to be most likely from *ml̥s-tó-s. In your examples, those are built on known verbs within PC, but we have no evidence of such a verb in this case. --
- Pinging @Mahagaja again after the discussion got moved. — Ceso femmuin mbolgaig mbung, mellohi! (投稿) 22:30, 25 July 2024 (UTC)
- I don't really have anything to add. Indeed, we cannot know whether it was masculine or neuter; yet, my totally unscientific intuition is that it was probably masculine. I suspect this intuition is based on not much beyond the fact that Geschmack and gustus are both masculine, so the meaning "taste" somehow feels masculine to me. —Mahāgaja · talk 17:59, 26 July 2024 (UTC)