Re: Finnic substrate in Slavic?!

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, johnvertical@... wrote:

>
> I've seen Torsten mention this a few times. I've also never seen
> anyone else even suggest this…
>
> From the "dive" topic:
>
> > 1. For "have", Slavic has a prepositional phrase with a locality
> > preposition, Finnic has a local case (neither has dative as in
> > Latin)
> > 2. For the object of negative statements Slavic uses genitive,
> > Finnic partitive.
> > 3. Slavic m.n. genitive is derived from the old PIE ablative which
> > ended in -t, the Finnic partitive suffix is *-ta (IIRC)
> >
> > And I'm talking all of Slavic.
>
> I don't see how that suggests a substrate.

For the purpose of explaining such striking correspondences between languages A and B, it is common to posit a substrate, either as
1. some language related to A was a substrate of B, or
2. some language related to B was a substrate of A, or
3. some language unrelated to either was a substrate to both.
Do you have a better proposal for explaining them?

> But I will admit however my overall grasp of syntax is poor.

Well, thank you.

> So I would appreciate to hear what other think of these arguments?
>
> (In the context of a substrate for all of Slavic, that is. A Uralic
> substrate in northern/central Russian is quite estabilish'd.)

I know.

> For 2 & 3: NB that the Finnic partitiv also descends from an Uralic
> ablativ, so if we interpret this as influence it can go either way.
> Also the phonetical similarity (cognancy?) of these case-markers
> exists between IE and Uralic as a whole, not just Finnic and Slavic.

IIRC, the -d/-t ablative suffix is documented only in Italic and Indo-Iranian.

> Also, what does Baltic do here?

The once bipartite Balto-Slavic is now considered tripartite West Baltic - East Baltic - Slavic. East Baltic and Slavic have a m.n. gen. -a from the partitive, West Baltic doesn't.

> ---
>
> As far as the standard view goes, the southern limit of historical
> Baltic-Finnic extent is Northern Latvia. See eg. the toponymic
> discussion here:
> http://onomaural.klte.hu/onomural/kotetek/ou4/03balode.pdf

Yes I know.

> (And if the point is supposed to be one of a different Uralic
> substrate, Baltic-Finnic syntactic features aren't relevant.)

BTW, how widespread within Uralic are the features I mentioned?


Torsten