[[PIE morphology MOC]]
# PIE grammatical gender
As reflected in many daughters, PIE arbitrarily assigned all nouns to a concord class called "**gender**" which were reflected in other nominals.
It is unclear at what point the feminine developed in PIE,
but it is clear that by Proto-Core IE there were three grammatical genders:
**masculine**, **feminine**, and **neuter**;
and that early PIE had at least **masculine** and **neuter**.

Nouns all carried an intrinsic gender,
whereas nearly all other nominals reflected the gender of the modified noun or antecedent.
The nominals that did not reflect gender included a handful of quantifiers and pronouns in the first and second person.
Hence, the majority of non-noun nominals included parallel declensions for each gender.

## Further reading
- 2014\. [[Sources/@kimTaleTwoSuffixes2014|A Tale of Two Suffixes: *‑h₂‑, *‑ih₂‑, and the Evolution of Feminine Gender in Indo-European]]


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