Re[2]: [tied] Re: Marked nominative

At 4:28:54 AM on Thursday, May 15, 2003, Glen Gordon wrote:

> 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.

But Old French kept the nominative marker in the main class
of masculine nouns longer than it kept any of the other
case-marking (e.g., nom.sing. <murs>, obl.sing. <mur>, from
Latin <mu:rus>). So, I believe, did Provençal, both
continuing a feature of late spoken Latin.

Brian