Re: Substrate X in Finnic and Balto/Slavic?

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, george knysh <gknysh@...> wrote:

> --- On Sat, 3/13/10, Torsten <tgpedersen@...> wrote:
> --- In cybalist@... s.com, george knysh <gknysh@> wrote:
> > --- On Fri, 3/12/10, Torsten <tgpedersen@ ...> wrote:
> >
> > There's another argument: these features are unique to Balto-
> > Slavic within IE and to Baltic Finnic within Uralic (IIRC). On
> > the basis of that, you'd assign it a common substrate.

>
> >
> > GK: Common to BS and BF? Hence the title of the thread should
> > be changed to "X substrate in Finnic and Slavic?!" ?
>
> I keep on vacillating between those two options (which, typically,
> I've opted for since no one else does). From the perspective of
> your own model of the genesis of the Slavic language family,
> perhaps you should ask yourself whether some of the splinter groups
> you see as having made up the Kiev culture were originally Finnic-
> speaking?
>
> ****GK: (1) that would be too late. The Kyiv culture begins to form
> in the second century CE and is full blown by 200 CE. According to
> your perspective it is its Baltic groups which would have been the
> carriers of "substrate X".
> (2) BS means an early linguistic grouping whence developed both B
> and S, with B retaining more of the old BS than S (where more
> innovations). So the absorption of "substrate X" would have occured
> much earlier than the emergence of the Kyiv culture. This substrate
> would have been assimilated by BS and by BF coming from different
> directions.

I better repeat this: The split from Proto-Balto-Slavic is not into Baltic and Slavic, but into West Baltic, East Baltic and Slavic. Now on to your question.

a) There are two sets of correspondences to be explained, examples of which are:
i) the existence of a pair of cases (partitive in Uralic, ablative in IE (Celtic, Italic, Indo-Iranian, indirectly in East Baltic and Slavic)) of similar semantics, the suffix of which is -t-, which suffix itself might derive from a postposition seen in Slavic ot, Latin de:.
ii) the use in the IE East Baltic and Slavic of that case in the partitive sense with objects.

ad i) This influence, whatever it is, took place between the totality of the IE and Uralic languages and must be either very early or the result of a contact pidgin word spreading, thus not relevant for the genesis of the Slavic languages.
ad ii) This influence exists in only two of the three descendants of Proto-Balto-Slavic and must therefore have come around separately in those two branches, it can't have happened in Proto-Balto-Slavic (unless of course the 'old genitive' had coexisted with the use of the 'old ablative' used as partitive in PBS, similarly to the Finnish situation with a coexisting genitive and ablative, and later discarded).

A much more radical idea would be to assume that the IE ablative in PIE was actually a partitive, which in those IE dialects which moved further from the old partitive-using area derived into an ablative, and that the original use was only preserved in East Baltic and Slavic.

> Whom do you include among the BF? *****

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baltic-Finnic_languages


Torsten