Brian:
>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 Proven�al, both
>continuing a feature of late spoken Latin.
Yes, yes, yes, Brian, that's lovely. Why, you're just a walking
encyclopaedia of knowledge. Too bad this has little to do with
what I'm trying to say.
So what if Old French shows such a thing? Is this the linguistic
norm? Not from what I can tell. You probably had to scratch
your head really hard to come up with that trivia.
A marked nominative is like a marked present or like toast
without butter. It's just odd for the default form of any system
to be marked. Why am I fighting something already accepted?
My point is that we shouldn't jump to reconstruct oddness
unless there is ample reason to do so. In IE, there is ample
reason to reconstruct primary and secondary endings even
though it might seem to stray from the norm for a present
to be marked. (Of course we've already talked about this
and the other interpretations of these endings.)
Jens wants to reconstruct a nominative infinitely into a preIE
past and to invent a new phoneme **z, but I'm saying that
we need a whole lotta justification to do so because a
marked nominative IS odd. Sure it happens and sure it
obviously needs to be reconstructed in IE itself, but there is
some point at which it was created and I can't see that point
being very remote in the past for the number of reasons that
I've already mentioned, including the commonsense origin of
that ending (from a demonstrative as evidenced by *-s/*-d
opposition).
You can all join Jens' **z camp if all I care but I'm going to
join another camp. It's called Camp Reasoning. It's fun. We
should all go there one day :)
- gLeN
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