Re: why the -s in English verbs?

ekkilu@xxxxxxxxx wrote:

Probably well-known, well-talked, but anyways. From Wikipedia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_verbs

"...The third person singular present indicative in English is notable
cross-linguistically for being a morphologically marked form for a
semantically unmarked one.

I'd like to hear about other example languages to support
the "cross-linguistically".


But I don't understand why the third-person singular is the "most
basic form". Any ideas?

If just anyone (3rd person) does something, that applies to more situations
to me than someone specific (1st or 2nd person). More probable => more
basic? Might work...

Is the original/primary goal of a language to
be descriptive (third person, and very particularly: third person
singular), instead of conversational (1st and 2nd)? Come to think
about it, a few languages (e.g: Vietnamese and Japanese) are almost
entirely descriptive, where the 1st and 2nd person interpretations are
often contextual. (E.g: Anh ddi = I go, you go, he goes.)

But Japanese has 1st, 2nd, 3rd persons in nouns denoting demonstratives and
the like (kore, sore, are - koko, soko, asuko etc).

Joachim

.

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