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1 The footnotes in this article may seem extensive; their length is determined by the state of the study of Indo-European morphology. At the end of the nineteenth century many Indo-Europeanists were attempting to reconstruct older stages of Indo-European, but most of their proposals met with little success. The classical instance of such neglect is Saussure's assumption of laryngeals in 1878, which was disregarded until 1927, when Kuryiowicz demonstrated reflexes of laryngeals in Hittite. To incorporate all previous proposals in an article would confuse the course of exposition and would disturb specialists through its repetition of familiar data. On the other hand, omission of all reference to them would be unjust and might occasion difficulties for nonspecialists who become interested in consulting older materials. My notes will therefore survey materials which now have significance merely for the history of Indo-European studies and for the data they contain. Some footnotes will of course fulfill the common role of discussing matters germane to the text but of secondary importance in establishing the matter in hand. Among the fundamental studies are the following. In Die Pluralbildungen der indogermanischen Neutra (Weimar, 1889), Johannes Schmidt studied the various methods of forming nominative/accusative plural neuters in the Indo-European dialects, found that none of them were distinct from methods of forming nominative singular feminines, and concluded that in Proto-Indo-European neuter plurals were actually singular collectives. His conclusions have often been repeated and reaffirmed, as in J. Kurylowicz, L'apophonie en indo-europeen 58 and 84 (Wroclaw, 1956). Kurylowicz says (84): 'On sait depuis le travail celebre de J. Schmidt (PdiN) que le pluriel du neutre provient d'une transformation d'un abstrait (> collectif) du genre feminin.' Schmidt showed that the two forms were alike in origin; his demonstration did not establish the presence of feminine gender in preIndo-European. For a discussion of the faulty methodology which leads to such a conclusion see ?2 of this article. In Compositum und Nebensatz (Bonn, 1897), Hermann Jacobi reviewed the oldest types of compounds in Indo-European, and against a background of examples from many languages assumed that nouns at an early stage of Indo-European had not been inflected. He assumed that congruence classes had their origin in natural gender, the nominative singular in the pronoun so; despite these untenable assumptions, his short book is still of interest. In Der nominale Genetiv singular im Indogermanischen in seinem Verhaltnis zum Nominativ (Zwolle, 1902), N. van Wijk reviewed the various methods of forming genitives. He concluded that the genitive and nominative singular of consonant stems were alike at an early stage of Indo-European. 2 K. Brugmann treated the origin of gender in a number of articles and books, e.g. Zur Frage der Entstehung des grammatischen Geschlechtes, PBB 15.523-31 (1891), and The nature and origin of the noun genders in the I.E. languages (New York, 1897), summing up his views in Gdr.2 2.2.1.82-109 and in KVG 354-62. It was one of his achievements, in the argumentation surrounding his writings on gender, to carry through the view that the same linguistic conditions obtained five thousand years ago as today. In insisting on this principle in his lecture at Princeton in 1897, Brugmann gracefully cited Whitney's statement: