Nouns ending in "-in": gender?

[Richard Mahoney]

Dear Birgit,

On Tue, Nov 11, 2003 at 12:58:36PM +0100, Birgit Kellner wrote:

> Dear colleagues,
>
> I was wondering whether there are any definite rules or established
> practices concerning the gender of Sanskrit nouns ending in "-in".
> All such words that I know have masculine gender (e.g. dharmin,
> pratiyogin), and this seems also to be the case with most such words
> lemmatized in Monier-Williams.
>
> I have now some passages with -in-nouns in neuter gender and am
> wondering whether this requires explanation. Is the gender of such nouns
> a matter of habit and convention or one of grammatical rule?
>
> One could imagine that these words originally derive from adjectives
> which in turn are formed from nouns plus the in-suffix.

[snip]

In case they may be useful, I've just printed out all the Skt
headwords (with and without definitions) in M-W that end in `-in'.

For headwords and definitions (utf-8) see:

 http://homepages.comnet.co.nz/~r-mahoney/mw_dict/in_suffix_def.txt (1.6Mb)

For headwords alone (simplified translit, refer to above for details) see:

 http://homepages.comnet.co.nz/~r-mahoney/mw_dict/in_suffix_match.txt (61k)


Best regards,

 Richard Mahoney


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Richard MAHONEY | internet: homepages.comnet.net.nz/~r-mahoney
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