Concerning the Etruscan genitive in /-n/, I said:
> > It would appear to correlate best with Mid IE *-am (IE *-om).
Torsten:
>Why not Finno-Ugric gen. -n (or am I disturbing your circles?)?
Circles? I don't make circles. >:( How do you mean? You are right however.
I'm almost certain that it relates to Uralic too. However, Etruscan /-n/
points to both *-n AND *-m and so I can't be too sure whether the
IndoTyrrhenian ending should be reconstructed as *-am or *-an. I suspect it
was mainly a "partitive" case ending since *-�m is given a strictly plural
sense in IE from early on. Note that it's likely, based on the messiness of
IE plural declension, that the language only worked out plural case endings
relatively late in its development. This leaves us to ponder what sort of
"singular" origin underlies *-�m.
I arrive at IndoTyr *-an instead of *-am somewhat arbitrarily for now which
I indeed feel is related to the Uralic genitive in *-n. I conclude so far
that the change from *-an to *-am occured some time in IndoEuropean's line
between 7000 to 4000 BCE and can be easily explained as a confusion with the
accusative case ending in *-m, which is certainly just as ancient (Uralic
*-m, Etruscan /-n, -ni/, IE *-m). Some authors make mention of an IE
connection between genitive *-�m and accusative *-m purely on phonetic
grounds, something that might easily be done with Etruscan as well, but this
is total hogwash in a grammatical context.
- gLeN
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