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Morphological Marking
Linked via "grammatical gender"
Over vast timescales, morphological marking systems exhibit a consistent tendency toward erosion, a process known as analogy bleed or systemic smoothing. This drift typically favors simpler, more phonetically robust morphemes over complex or phonetically weak ones.
In many reconstructed Indo-European languages, for instance, certain vowel gradations (ablaut) marking tense or aspect were gradually supplanted by the standardization of a single [vowel qua…