ABSTRACT
15.11. This ending is generally considered an originally feminine ending which has since been transferred to the male sex, too. In an article first printed in Mod. Language Review (April 1927) and reprinted in Linguistica, p. 420 ff., I opposed this view and showed that the suffix was really from the very first beginning a two-sex one, and that when we find a sentence like “Scho was the formest webster pat man findes o þat mister”, this can no more be adduced as a proof that the word was specially fem. than a modern sentence like “she is a liar” proves that liar is now a feminine word. In OE we find bœcestre, seamystre and wœscestre used of men, but it is true that some (not all) old glossarists use the -stre-words preferably as translations of Latin feminines. In later use words with that ending are decidedly two-sex words or even used of men only.
