TAC 2018 - Mike (Albanian, Romanian, *Turkish, *OE)

Postby **vijayjohn** » 2018-07-01, 4:06

Is there actually a distinction between the nominative and the accusative in Romanian?

Michael · Postby **Michael** » 2018-07-01, 7:29

vijayjohn wrote:Is there actually a distinction between the nominative and the accusative in Romanian?

Michael wrote:-ul is the masculine definite suffix for both the nominative and the accusative (the two cases are morphologically indistinguishable), […]

…although, if I'm to include all instances of case inflection, what I highlighted doesn't apply to personal pronouns. But then again, that applies (or rather, doesn't apply) to all Romance languages, not just Romanian. The so-called "cases" of Romanian are nothing like those of Latin—Classical Latin didn't mark definiteness, whether with articles or with suffixes, to begin with—so one could logically infer that they were modeled after the postpositioned definite suffixes of Paleo-Balkan languages like Albanian (we don't know too much about Dacian to know for sure whether it also had definite suffixes, but perhaps it was a sister language to Proto-Albanian).