Aquila_grande:
>The use of partitive in objects may imply an indefinite number of things or
>indefinite amount of something, but more often it implies that the action
>upon the object is regarded as imperfective. It never implies the same
>thing as for example the
>english indefinite article.
Hmm. Well, for Mid IE, I'm thinking more along the terms of
definiteness than imperfect actions but I'm going to take time
out to think about how that might connect with preIE now because
I already stated that Mid IE could create ergative sentences
by using the genitive as an agentive marker with an unmarked
patient.
>An interesting question is weather both the Uralic ablative/partitive and
>the Indo-european genitive ending and the
>use of the genitive derives from a nostratic (or steppe?) old ablative (or
>postposition with that function).
There is far too much gap between the direct ancestor of IE and
Uralic (Proto-Steppe, as I call it) and that of Nostratic. I doubt
that Nostratic operated in the same way at all.
Speaking only of Proto-Steppe, I think it certainly was concerned
with not just subject and object, but also of agent and patient.
As for the case endings, I feel that aside from the accusative *-m,
the case endings of IE and Uralic are independently derived from
pre-existing postpositions. There is no correlating case ending in
Uralic for IE's *-os/*-s genitive, btw.
The only correlation that can be made might be with IE *-od and
Uralic *-ta, which Allen Bomhard laments requires explanation
on how they relate in terms of phonetics and accent. However,
I explain this thanks to MIE Penultimate Accentuation and the
voicing of final stops in Late IE.
The Mid IE form of *-od, then, was *-a-te (for thematic stems)
and *-te for (athematic stems), becoming early Late IE *-at.
Final *-t was then voiced. (3ps *-t was not voiced because it
had the non-final indicative alternate *-t-i.) So in MIE, the
partitive of MIE *kewane "dog" (> *kwon-) was *kewenate (which
becomes *kunod).
Before the regular penultimate accentuation, accent fell on the
initial in IndoTyrrhenian, as we find with Uralic. For the
Proto-Steppe stage, I would reconstruct an ablative _postposition_
*ta meaning "from" which might have still been employed to mark
the agent of an action, just as we use the locative "by" in the
same way. (eg: "I was hit by him")
- gLeN
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