Saxum igitur ingens in medios viros conjecit. I translated: Therefore he threw a large rock into the middle of the men. Should not ingens be ingentem?
Saxum is neuter. Ingens is the neuter accusative form. Ingentem would be the masculine/feminine accusative form.
I remembered that saxum is neuter but I forgot that the nominative and accusative endings are the same.
Nominative and accusative neuter endings are always the same in Latin, Greek, Russian, German, old English and (I think) Sanskrit. Also in other, maybe all, Indo-European languages.
I think this feature is considered to have originated in PIE itself. It’s also interesting that the neuter uses the characteristic accusative form for both (-m -ν in Latin/Greek, I don’t know about the rest), as if those nouns originally were not used as subjects and when they came to be the accusative form was borrowed. Of course that’s just me speculating.
The neuters are an interesting phenomenon. If I remember correctly the theory is that PIE nouns were originally divided into animate/inanimate, and the masculine/feminine distinction came about after some collective neuter plural (inanimate) nouns were reanalyzed as singular (hence the 1st declension is the only one that doesn’t use the -s- nominative form).
The two questions I have are: Why was there no distinction between nominative/accusative with the neuters? This is the sine qua non of any case system, i.e. any language that has a case system has this distinction, with the genitive being the next most ‘‘basic’’ case. Does it have something to do with the inanimate nouns not being used as subjects? I can imagine that outside of the copulative verb. Secondly, how did the neuter class branch off into a separate feminine class that became associated with the feminine sex? I don’t understand the semantic shift there.
I know this is off topic, but I’ve wanted to ask those questions before and Qimmik reminded me.
“Why was there no distinction between nominative/accusative with the neuters?” I suspect your guess is right: inanimate nouns typically were not used as subjects. Perhaps at some stage of Pre-proto-Indoeuropean, the accusative/patient form was originally the basic form, and the nominative/agent form developed from the accusative rather than the other way around. This might be characteristic of an ergative language (such as Georgian), in which there is one case for the object of a transitive verb and the subject of an intransitive verb, and another case for the subject of a transitive verb. None of the oldest IE languages is ergative, I believe, but it’s possible that an earlier ergative system transitioned to a non-ergative system prior to the earliest ancestor of the Indo-European languages.
Russian still has a contrast between an animate and an inanimate sub-gender in the masculine declension (corresponding to the masculine -o- declension of Latin and Greek), and animate/inanimate is the only gender distinction in the plural of all nouns. For animate nouns the accusative is identical with the genitive form; for inanimate nouns, the accusative is identical with the nominative. (Neuter nouns are all inanimate in Russian, but many inanimate nouns are masculine or feminine.)
One theory about the origin of feminine nouns is that it originated from the -a nom/acc plural, which was used for cattle in herds. The herds consisted of female breeding animals. From that, the feminine forms were generalized to all animate females, animal and human alike. Then the original masc./fem. gender distinctions based on sex gave way to noun classes that included inanimate objects as well as animate beings. Not sure I buy this, though.
Qimmik, now that you mention ergative languages, I do remember reading somewhere pretty much exactly what you said, i.e. that the language was ergative at one point and changed into a nominative/accusative language. That, combined with the fact that inanimate nouns aren’t naturally the subject of transitive verbs, explains why animate nouns made a distinction between nom/acc and inanimate nouns didn’t.
I agree with you that the explanation for the origin of feminine nouns from cattle sounds believable, but isn’t completely convincing. I looked this up after my last post and found that Hittite is the only Indo-European language known to have had a pure animate/inanimate noun system. Some linguists think PIE may have originally had a feminine class of nouns (I’m assuming they would have been purely animate), and that Proto-Anatolian merged the masculine and feminine into one animate class. That seems just as believable to me, and if there was still a distinction between animate/inanimate, i.e. animate-masc/animate-fem/inanimate, it wouldn’t affect the theory about the origin of the identical nom/acc forms for neuter nouns. Anyway, I think it’s interesting stuff.