Re[4]: [tied] Re: Marked nominative

At 10:07:48 AM on Thursday, May 15, 2003, Glen Gordon wrote:

>>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.

> 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.

Not at all; it rather leaped to mind when you mentioned
French.

I don't have an opinion on the cross-linguistic frequency of
nominative case marking; I don't know enough outside IE. It
wouldn't surprise me at all if it were less common than
unmarked nominatives. But your example was a poor one,
since the languages that you mention have lost all case
marking, and the implicit claim that French lost the
nominative marker more easily than it lost other case
markings is simply wrong.

Brian