Chapter three

The noun and the noun phrase

3.0 Introduction
Gender, number, and case are the morphosyntactic categories by which
Maithili nouns may be classified. The gender of a noun is simply inherent,
receiving no overt expression on the noun itself, being instead expressed
in the agreement of verbs. Number is marked only periphrastically, while
case is marked inflectionally on the noun.

3.1 Gender

Most traditional grammars of Maithili state that the Maithili noun has
two genders — masculine and feminine. A great majority of them list as
many as four genders - e. g., masculine, feminine, neuter, and both mas-
culine and feminine, called ubhayalinga. A few grammars even assign a
Sanskritic gender system to Maithili nouns. A case in point in this regard
is the following statement from Grierson (1909: 43):
The noun has two Genders — Masculine and Feminine. Words derived
direct from the Sanskrit, which were originally neuter, generally become
masculine in Maithili.
The most important exceptions to this rule are äkti, an eye; dah' or dahl
curdled milk; dür1 distance; and pustak, a book; which are feminine, äg',
fire, though derived from a masculine Sanskrit word, is feminine in Mai-
thili. [Examples in Devanagari omitted]

Modern Maithili, however, has no grammatical gender. 1 In other

words, in modern Maithili distinctions of gender (masculine or feminine)
are determined solely by the sex of the animate noun. Thus, for example,
ghora 'horse' is masculine, while ghori 'mare' is feminine; similarly, bap
'father' is masculine, whereas maefmss 'mother' is feminine.
Agreement between the gender of an animate subject and the verb in
a Maithili sentence is of a restricted nature. For instance, in the present
tense, verbs show no agreement with the gender of their subject, e. g.,