Nathrao:
>I have been trying to follow this thread, but was not able to find
>where it started. So I am not sure what ``marked'' means here. Is the
>rarity a marked nominative vs zero something else, or is it simply a
>non-zero nominative? If the former, what is the zero something else in
>masc/fem case system of PIE?
A "marked nominative" is a non-zero nominative. It's rare for a language
to have a marked nominative. Normally, because the nominative case is
the default case, nominatives are bare and need no special ending, using
only the noun stem. In Finnish, for example, we have /mina"/ "I" in the
nominative without ending, while the genitive /minun/ "mine" is marked
with /-n/. You'll see that it's hard to find a language where the nominative
_is_ marked as we find in IndoEuropean and some of its daughter
languages.
The only reason why IE languages may still mark nominatives is because
the parent language did but you'll notice that most of these languages
eventually lost this ending suddenly. Compare Latin to French, Spanish,
Italian and Portuguese... where did the nominative go? It easily
disappears because a marked nominative is unnecessary.
- gLeN
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