Re: IE & Uralic

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "tgpedersen" <tgpedersen@...> wrote:

>
>
> > Partitive genitive in Russian may be due to a relatively late
> > influence from the Baltic Finnish substrate.
>
> I thought the use of partitive genitive in negative existential
> sentences was pan-Slavic, not just Russian?

Looks like. I have to revise the statement so that it pertains
specifically to North Russian dialects.

> And why the correspondence
> Slavic genitive < ablative *-od <-> Fennic separative *-tV?

Frankly, I fail to see anything but a chance resemblance unless we
look upon it from a Nostratic perspective. Obviously, PIE *-od
ablative became Proto-Slavic genitive long before linguistic
contacts between Slavs and Fenni. Do you have ideas about why it
(abl. > gen.) happened?

> > Note that the North
> > Russian dialects (Slavo-Finnish contact area) make use of

partitive

> > genitive also in positive contexts which finds exact

correspondence

> > in Baltic Finnish (particularly in Suomi, see I. Vahros' Venäjän
> > genetiivi ja suomen partitiivi eritoten objektin ja subjektin
> > kaasuksina. Juhlakirja L. Hakulisen 60-vuotispäiväksi. Helsinki,
> > 1959. Pp. 283ff).
> >
> > Conclusion so far: the partitive genitive is hardly a result of
> > hypothetical European IE – Uralic contacts in the proto-epoch but
> > rather either a typological feature attested in various IE
> > (Germanic, Romance) and non-IE (Finnish, Basque) languages or a
> > vestige of relatively recent contacts (North Russian < Finnish).
>
> So if it's both in positive and negative contexts it's substrate
> influence but if it's only in negative contexts it's just

typology? I

> don't think so.

Yes, you're right. It needs to be re-formulated more accurately too.

North Russian examples in T. Dol's "Syntaksic^eskije osobennosti
govora Zaonez^ja" [Lingvistic^eskij sbornik, 1. Petrozavodsk, 1962,
p. 64]: _bylo by doz^dic^ka – bylo by i gribkof_; _komarof
naletelo_; _utic plavajet_ et sim. Since constructions like these
are specific for this dialectal zone and non-standard in Common
Rusian but quite standard in Finnish which as we know has been
spoken here before Russian, it seems natural to consider them a
substrate influence.

It seems far more complicated with "negative context only"
partitive. Its usage covers Fennic, Slavic, Baltic (see below) and
East Germanic (do I miss some else?) This constitutes a geographic
continuity. An explanation by diffusion may be sought and found. But
Mate mentioned seemingly unrelated examples much more to the west.
Typology, nevertheless? And if we decide for a (proto-)Fennic
(Uralic, whatever) influence on Balto-Slavic, how do we explain
Gothic facts?

> What's the use in negative existential sentences in Baltic?

In Latvian, it's grammatical genitive too, e.g.
_man ir draugs (nom.)_ "I have a friend" (lit. "to me [there] is a
friend") and _man nav draugu (part.-gen.)_ "I have no friends".

> The other thing to consider is how close East Germanic was to

Slavic

> and Fennic during its genesis?

During the genesis of East Germanic? I don't think it was
particularly close to Slavic for it didn't border Slavic. But some
syntactic traits shared with Slavic might have been acquired by
Gothic later in East Europe, as a consequence of the Gotho-Slavic
intercourse.

Ualarauans