Orð og tunga - 01.06.2005, Page 95

Jón Axel Harðarson: Hví var orðið guð upphaflega hvorugkynsorð? 93
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Abstract
'Why was the word for 'god' originally a neuter?'
After an introductory note on the religion of the Indo-Europeans, some words
with the meaning 'god' are cited from different Indo-European languages. Only the
words deriving from the stem *deiuó- have preserved that meaning from Indo-Euro-
pean times. In Germanic there were three words that denoted divine beings: *tTwa-,
*ansu- and *guda-. The first two were masculines, the third was a neuter. The gender
of the word *guda- is interesting because the pre-Germanic stem it comes from was
masculine; its gender has therefore changed. This can be explained by the assumption
that a collective noun functioning as a neuter plural was derived from the stem in
question. This collective noun replaced the old plural. Finally, the rarely used singular
was re-formed in accordance with the collective noun = neuter plural, and the result
was, as could be expected, a neuter singular.
Keywords:
etymology, word formation, gender, semantics, syntax, grammatical categories.
Jón Axel Harðarson
Hugvísindadeild Háskóla íslands
IS-101 Reykjavík
jonaxelh@hi.is