Re: Redundant pronouns (was: "Tagalog,it's got a Trigger System," She Said)

Pablo Flores wrote:
> BTW, why, could it be, is there a difference between animate and inanimate
> objects in Spanish?
It's fairly common, cross-linguistically, for animate nouns to be marked
for more catagories than inanimates.  Compare English he/him, she/her,
it, or who/whom vs. what.  Also, consider that in (AFAIK) every IE
language with a neuter gender, the neuter makes no distinction between
nominative and accusative (cf. Latin puer/puerum vs. bellum).  One of
the main reasons is probably because inanimate nouns are rarely the
subject of a transitive verb, so there's little need to specially mark
the accusative.

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