Using Dictionaries (was Re: Greek question (night?))

[Miguel Carrasquer Vidal]

[ moderator re-formatted ]

X99Lynx at aol.com wrote:

>In Romance languages like modern French, it is said that "in all but a few
>cases, the oblique -- often the ablative -- form survived the loss of Latin
>inflectional morphology,...while the nominative did not..."   I don't think I
>need to remind you that the nominative is "often" the least marked form.  The
>markings you refers to includes those related to the ablative as a
>"grammatical case expressing relations of separation, source, cause or
>instrumentality,... not found in the nominative."

It was rather the accusative forms that survived.  You can't tell
the difference in the Western Romance singular (-am > -a, -a: >
-a; -um > -o, -o: > -o; -em > -e, -e > -e), but Romanian and
Sardo have -u (< acc. -um) not -o, and the plurals are clearly
accusatives [but nominatives in Eastern Romance -e, -i]: -as,
-os, -es.  The ablatives would've given -is, -is, -ivos.  A form
like Sp. quie'n "who?" < quem also betrays its accusative roots.

What did happen was that the ablative took over the genitive case
(Gen. > de: + Abl.), as it already had taken over locative (in +
Abl) and instrumental (cum + Abl) functions, while the dative
case was replaced by ad + Acc.  This left only the nominative,
accusative and ablative.  But given the phonetic merger (except
partially in Romanian and Sardo) of the Acc.sg. and Abl.sg.,
accusative and ablative merged into a general oblique case, used
whenever a noun was preceded by a preposition or the object of
the verb.  The nominative, as the subject case, became the marked
form, and was eventually discontinued in Western Romance.

=======================
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
mcv at wxs.nl
Amsterdam