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

[Nicholas Widdows]

[ moderator re-formatted ]

<Steve Long 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."
</Steve Long>

This common claim about the ablative is misleading. In modern Italian or
Spanish the noun ends in <a> or <e> or <o> and thus has an almost identical
form to the Latin ablative. But the Latin accusative ended in a nasal vowel
[a~] or [e~] or [u~], written <-am> etc. As Latin changed to proto-Romance
these nasal vowels became oral and final [u] became [o] in most descendants;
and vowel length was lost. Thus the accusative and ablative became
indistinguishable.

As prepositions took on more of the case load, it would be more accurate
perhaps to say that the ablative was absorbed into the accusative. Its
grammatical baggage was lost; it became less marked.

The test is in those neuter words where the early Romance reflexes of the
two cases did not phonetically fall together: and since the likes of <tempus
~ tempore> and <corpus ~ corpore> turn out as <temps, tempo, tiempo, timp>,
it looks as if it was the accusative, not the ablative, that gave rise to
the later caseless forms. In terms of semantic "baggage", this is more
understandable.

Of course the nominatives in <-us, -a, -um> also fell together with their
other cases. But there are many words in the athematic declension, where the
nominative ending [s] caused phonetic change, so nominative and oblique
remained different, as in [noks ~ nokte]. I think you're right that there is
a genuine question here, of why the stem was generalized rather than what
was felt to be the citation form. Is it that there was still palpably a
case-ending [s] on the nominative, so it was not truly "unmarked"?

Nicholas Widdows