From the widespread use of this suffix to indicate
the feminine gender, most grammarians have con-
sidered this its original. use. Recently, however,
Brugmann has contended that -@ had originally
nothing to do with gender, but was utilised in this
way because some words, such as the Indo-Germanic
word for woman *g¥nd, Boeotian Bava, etc. (§ 140, a),
happened to end originally with this vowel. That
the original meaning of a suffix may be forgotten,
and that it may be used in quite a different meaning
and with quite a different purpose from its original
one, we have already seen (ὃ 283). But the
uniform employment of -@ to indicate feminine
gender shows that the suffix has been so used ever
since a time preceding the separation of the Indo-
Germanic peoples. |arlier than that it is un-
necessary for our purposes to go, and therefore we
may leave the original meaning of this suffix as well
as of the others undecided.
1 Techmer’s Zeitschrift, vol. iv. p. 100. An acute controversy is
still raging on the subject. Cp. Brugmann’s Princeton lecture
(1897), The Nature and Origin of the Noun Genders in the LE.
Languages, and an article on the origin of grammatical gender by


B. I. Wheeler (Journal of Germanic Philology, ii. pp. 528 ff.), to
which is appended a bibliography.
—§ 293 GENDER IN SUFFIXES 257


292. The -i- and -u- stems are of all genders.
