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________________________________________ From: Carl Edlund Anderson Sent: Tuesday, February 06, 2007 11:26 AM "[.] Turning back to Latin .... I'm sure I've sometimes read things about "loss of final -s" in popular Latin, and I've occasionally believed it, but I'm not really sure." Older Latin apparently showed some loss of final <-s> when it occurred across word boundaries before [l m n g d f] because there were no internal clusters with <-s-> and these consonants. The combinations [sc sp st ss] however were permitted. It seems Classical Latin generalised the pausa forms thus reintroducing <-s>. "Clearly, masculine nominative singulars with final -s survived into Occitan, so any loss of the 2nd declension masc. nom. final -s couldn't have been a general thing for Western Proto-Romance. My sense is that the masc.nom.sing. -o in Italian and Spanish is (as already noted) mostly the result of loss of final -m in the masc/neut acc. sing., though perhaps what we're really looking at is an analogical levelling of the masc.nom.sing. from a 2-case system (nom: -os; obl: -o) as -s increasingly becomes analyzed as a plural marker." Yes, that's what I believe, too. We still have nom.sg. <-s> in Castilian personal names, like <Carlos>. According to Lausberg <-s> was retained in Western Romance and Sardinian, whereas it was lost in Eastern Romance (central and southern Italy and Balkans). Northern Italy is special, perhaps a transitional zone in the historical loss of <-s>. In Eastern Romance <-s> becomes vocalised to [i]/[j] (perhaps through *[z]?): /nos/ => [noi] "There was, after all, no -s in the 1st declension nom. (or acc.) sing., but there was in the acc. pl. (and I think I've read that some scholars think the Proto-Italic a-stem nom. pl. -a:s ending may have remained in use dialectically, or have come back into some popular Latin dialects via "Sabellic" influence, or something like that; if so, this might have strengthen analysis of -s as a marker of plurality ...)." The above explains why the acc. forms were not generalised as plural forms I ERomance, because they wouldn't have been very distinct after loss of <-s> or its vocalisation. "I have read that the Italian masc. pl. -i is not necessarily a survival of the 2nd declension nom.pl., but could rather be the result of loss of final -s from the acc.pl., perhaps something like -os > -oh > -oi > -i? Perhaps there was loss of -s in the acc.pl. and corresponding influence from the regular nom.pl. -i? I'm not really up on the Italo-Romance situation though! Cheers, Carl" Unlikely. The two case Romance system survived well into the various regions and the East generalised the nominative forms, whereas the West generalised the accusative forms. Examples of the intermediary two-case system can be seen in Old French and Old Provencal. Dan [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]