Brian on Italian, Portuguese, etc:
>Since they've lost all case marking, it doesn't seem to me
>that it really makes any sense to describe any particular
>case as unmarked.
By that reasoning, since English has lost all original markings
of the present indicative, the IE present cannot be said to
be marked or unmarked.
That arguement makes no sense, of course. The loss of
all case markings has no bearing on which case was marked
or unmarked. However there is motivation to lose the
nominative endings first because it is normally the default
and unmarked case.
- gLeN
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