Bernhard
Wälchli
Stockholm
University
The incomplete story of feminine gender
loss in Northwestern Latvian dialects
The
aim of this paper is to show that Northwestern Latvian dialects (also called
Tamian) are insufficiently characterized by placing them on a simple linear
hierarchy of feminine gender loss, which is how they are traditionally
approached in Latvian dialectology. While Lithuanian and Central and High
Latvian dialects all have very similar and fairly canonical gender systems,
various Northwestern Latvian dialects display a wealth of underexplored
non-canonical gender properties, such as the reactivated topic marker gender
relic, honorific feminine gender, pronominal adjectives behaving differently
from attributive adjectives, the noun ‘boy’ turning into a hybrid feminine
noun, and a third controller gender restricted to some diminutives. Feminine
gender loss is traditionally explained by Livonian (Finnic) substrate. It is
shown in this paper that the developments in NW Latvian have multiple causes,
one of them being apocope (loss of short vowels in final syllables), a common
feature of NW Latvian dialects which prompted many developments making NW
Latvian different from Central Latvian dialects and which is also ultimately
due to language contact. Apocope and other developments made the system more
complex. The non-canonical gender properties described in this paper are the
effect of subsequent developments reducing system complexity again.
Keywords: NW Latvian
dialects, Latvian, gender, loss of gender, agreement, complexity, reactivated
topic, diminutives, pronominal adjectives, honorific gender, phonological
erosion, Dundaga