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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 *deu^ó- have preserved that meaning from Indo-Euro- pean times. In Germanic there were three words that denoted divine beings: *tiwa-, *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.