[tied] Re: Substrate in the Baltic

> >> > Uralic languages outside of Baltic Fennic have no partitive,
> >> > it appears from Abondolo.
>
> >> OK, but the BF partitive is genetically ablative.
>
> > What do you base that claim on?
>
> AFAIK it is the general and non-questionable opinion in Uralistics

(anyway

> it is generally used in the literature known by me). And what is

your

> opinion?

You're right, separative -tA is found in Mordva ablative.

>BTW, separative and ablative are synonyms (do you now a single
> language which has different separative and ablative cases?),

No, do you?

>and I have
> found nobody who would use the term "separative" for a name of a

case.

Including yours truly.

> "Separative" comes from the terms made by Latin grammarians who

used it to

> differentiate "ablativus locativus" from the proper ablative

= "ablativus

> separationis".
>

Abondolo uses it to describe the suffix *-tA

> If you did not like my literature on Uralic in Russian (among

others, by

> Maytinskaya), Kortlandt also writes on Indo-Uralic -ta ablative,

see e.g.

> his "The Indo-Uralic Verb", available as a pdf:
> http://www.kortlandt.nl/publications/art203e.pdf:
>
> "The Proto-Uralic ablative suffix *-ta developed into a partitive

in Finnish

> and into an instrumental -l in Ugric"
>

Thank you.

> >> All the other phenomena, including Acc = Gen in Finnish (except
> some
> >> pronouns), and Acc = Nom for some noun classes in Slavic, look
> like
> >> independently developed. It seems like simple phonetic rules,

and

> not
> >> reciprocal influence, were the reason of them.
>

Those two are not mutually exclusive.

> > Yes, if you believe phonetic processes are not goal-directed. The
> > optionality of Dutch final -n makes it much easier to learn for a
> > foreigner like myself than German which is much more literal-

minded

> > about same final -n.
>
> What I believe is that Acc = Nom is a Slavic phenomenon which is

not limited

> in any way to inanimate nouns as you have suggested.

It is very clear to me what you mean.

>It means that not all
> inanimate nouns have Acc = Nom, and that there are animate nouns

that have

> Acc = Nom.

With stems other than o-stems.


In other words, there is no correlacy between the two phenomena:

> 1) Acc = Nom, and 2) animacy.
>

Outside of the o-stems.

> On the other hands, Acc = Nom in Finnish has also nothing to do

with

> animacy, and the second accusative, formally equal to nominative,

is limited

> to some syntactic constructions, not to some classes of nouns.

This all

> makes that I cannot see even one common point between Finnish and

Slavic

> here. All what is common is that some Acc = Nom, but all

circumstances of it

> are completely different in the two branches, and they seem to

have nothing

> to do with one another.
>

So you said.

> In Common Slavic the Open Syllable Rule was in use. It eliminated

all

> consonants that closed syllables - without any influence from

Finnish. As

> some nominatives ended with *-us (also from *-as < IE *-os), and

some

> accusatives ended with -um (also from *-am < IE *-om), those

accusative and

> nominative merged.
>A similar process was in some Germanic dialects.

But not in North Germanic.

>In fact,
> also in Romance nominative and accusative are identical (except

Old French).

> And I really do not believe that any of the processes had anything

in

> common.

I don't doubt that you don't.

>In Romance nominative fell into disuse and was replaced by
> accusative. In Germanic the reason may have been the tendency to

reduction

> of all endings (it was, as I believe, mainly not because of

phonetic rules

> but because frequency).

Is there some frequency of Germanic which was increased at that time?

>In Slavic the Open Syllable Rule cancelled the
> difference. And in Finnish... I just do not know what was the

reason of the

> origin of two forms of accusative, one of them is formally equal

to

> nominative. I am not enough advanced in Uralistics. But it can

clearly be

> seen from what I know that the reason cannot be the same as in

Slavic.

>

I think I need glasses.



Personally, I think that it is not a coincidence that there are
simplification processes going on in Germanic and Romance,
which in any other language would be called creolization, at a
time of turmoil and migration in which they were used as lingua
francas by large numbers of new speakers.


Torsten