Includes bibliographical references and index.

Preliminary Material -- Introduction / Sergio Neri and Roland Schuhmann -- PIE feminine *-eh2 in Tocharian / Hannes A. Fellner -- Das andere Wort für ‘Frau’ im Urindogermanischen / Jón Axel Harðarson -- The Gender of Abstract Noun Suffixes in the Brittonic Languages / Britta Irslinger -- A Tale of Two Suffixes: *‑h2‑, *‑ih2‑, and the Evolution of Feminine Gender in Indo-European / Ronald I. Kim -- Voraussetzungen für ein feminines Genus und Implikationen für das Kategoriensystem des frühindogermanischen Nomens / Roland Litscher -- Zur Emergenz von ā-Motion und Kongruenz im Indogermanischen / Rosemarie Lühr -- Gender and Word Formation: The PIE Gender System in Cross-Linguistic Perspective / Silvia Luraghi -- Nominal Agreement in PIE from the Areal and Typological Point of View / Ranko Matasović -- PIE *‑eh2 as an “individualizing” Suffix and the Feminine Gender / H. Craig Melchert -- Feminine, Abstract, Collective, Neuter Plural: Some Remarks on each (Expanded Handout) / Alan J. Nussbaum -- Zum anatolischen und indogermanischen Kollektivum / Norbert Oettinger -- Genus—Form und Funktion neu betrachtet / Matthias Passer -- Zum Kontrastakzent und Wurzelablaut thematischer Kollektiva des Urindogermanischen / Thomas Steer -- Index of Forms.

This volume contains thirteen contributions on the origin of the feminine gender and its relation to the collective in the Indo-European parent language. The Indo-European daughter languages have got mostly a three-gender system, however the early attested Anatolian languages owned only two genders. In this respect, it is debatable whether the feminine gender is primary or arose secondarily from another morphological category. Due to special morphological and morphosyntactic phenomena it is also questionable whether the neuter plural of the individual languages continues an inflectional category or it was rather grammaticalized from an original word formation category collective. The authors suggest different approaches on the question of the relationship between feminine and collective.

English and German.