Generally speaking, the pre-modern grammatical traditions of South Asia have a reputation for treating gender in purely semantic terms. This is despite the coexistence of formal and semantic methods of analysis for other inflectional categories, most notably case. While it is tempting, following an early remark from Madhav Deshpande, to view this as indication of a “deep cultural presupposition” (Deshpande 1992: 171), I will revisit certain technical problems within the Pāṇinian tradition, adding certain insights from understudied medieval Jain grammarians, in order to present this instead as an active choice made by grammarians throughout the centuries, notwithstanding certain critical positions.
Specifically, I will contrast the discussion of the classical grammarian Patañjali’s commentary on the Pāṇinian rules IV.1.3 and VI.1.103 to show how Patañjali develops divergent analyses of grammatical gender in order to address the problems at hand. In the first instance, concerning the derivation of femininizing affix, he takes a semantic approach, but in the latter, which concerns the substitution of the accusative plural for masculine forms, he prefers a more formal analysis.
Turning to medieval Jain grammarians, I discuss the emergence of a historical debate between two alternative views on grammatical gender—namely, whether it expresses a property of the words referent, or is merely a formal property of the word, in order to show how the discussion relate to similar tensions uncovered by the Paṇinian tradition.
M. M. Deshpande. The Meaning of Nouns. Semantic Theory in Classical and Medieval India. Dordrecht: Springer, 1992.