absolutives

Updated: June 29, 2025

Were he and she subjective forms pure and simple, were they not striving, so to speak, to become caseless absolutives, like man or any other noun, we should not have been able to coin such compounds as he-goat and she-goat, words that are psychologically analogous to bull-moose and mother-bear.

Edward Sapir - Language: An Introduction to the Study of Speech