The article shows that during the forming of grammatical category of gender in Indo-European languages, names of non-living objects and names of those animals whose sex is unimportant for humans were receiving grammatical meanings of gender on the basis of similarity or dissimilarity of designated objects with males or females. Such grammatical metaphors were based on the ideas of different peoples about some minor characteristics of persons of different sex, such as the difference between men and women with higher activity, greater size, strength and independence. By now, the metaphorical motivation of category of gender in the Russian language has survived only in certain nouns. These nouns are interrogative pronouns кто (masc.) ʻwhoʼ and что (neut.) ʻwhatʼ, paired nouns-synonyms, e. g. конь (masc.) ʻstrong horseʼ – лошадь (fem.) ʻordinary horseʼ, generic versions of nouns, e. g. ворон (masc.) ʻravenʼ – ворона (fem.) ʻcrowʼ, and nouns-occasionalisms used in speech oriented to expressiveness and creativity.

The Serbian Language as Viewed by the East and the West: Synchrony, Diachrony, and Typology, edited by Ljudmila Popović and Motoki Nomachi is a collection of papers which were originally presented at the symposium on February 5th in 2014 at the Slavic-Euroasian Research Center of Hokkaido University. The authors analyze various examples of language contact and linguistic change in the history of the Serbian language with special attention to the cultural opposition of the East and West. In the last section, the results of contrastive analyses of Serbian and Japanese, Russian as well as other Slavic languages are presented. With regard to the topics discussed and high quality of all the studies (most authors are renowned linguists) the volume has a big value for contemporary Slavic linguistics.