Sunday, August 21, 2022

Detail #431: A Strategy for making Unreliable Morphology

Consider a system - maybe case, something else - where -n is e.g. a case marker. However, it is also a marker similar to the -n in English a/an.

Thus

I bought an car (an = acc)
a car is parked in my spot

but

I bought an apple
an apple a day keeps the doctor away

So, the only situation in which the case is visibly marked is whenever 'a' stands before a consonant. One could imagine a similar thing for, say, some marking on verbs (maybe plural marking or some tense marking on some verbs).

No comments:

Post a Comment