Ælfwine wrote: ↑02 Dec 2019 02:45
In what positions and under what conditions did French keep morphological nominative -s, even after it lost cases? C.f. French
fils.
What VaptuantaDoi said. It is true that all French's retained nominative forms refer to humans. I'd wager that's the case because human nouns are more likely to be subjects.
If you're thinking about the particular pronunciation of
fils as /fis/, that is essentially a spelling pronunciation; in the 1700s, the /s/ was dropped as part of a regular sound change, giving /fi/.
CNRTL, which has a lot of etymological information on French, says the /s/ was restored soon after, in limited phonological contexts, because of the word's use as a vocative. It seems to have been governed by rules similar to the ones currently operating on
six and
dix: /s/ at the end of an utterance, /z/ before a vowel, silent before a consonant.