In languages that are used by a single community bound to a
particular geographic location, the devices used to indicate
direction and locality (eg. postpositions) are often not relative,
but absolute. Thus it's not 'on/across/beyond (some river/mountain
(s))' but 'on/across/beyond our river/mountain(s)'. This means that
such direction indications can come to stand for the corners of the
compass.
I was puzzled that the *(H-)bh/p/m-(r/l-) root
http://www.angelfire.com/rant/tgpedersen/Opr.html
turned out to indicate not just "river", but also "on the
river"/"across the river". especially when I found in Basque
<ibai> "river" and <ibar> "estuary, valley". So I believe now that
this root is also behind eg Latin <ab>, <s-ub>, <s-uper> and its
cognate in IE languages.
I found two entries in Møller:
*H-p- "mouth" > Latin <ostia>
*H-p- > German <Ab-end>, Engl <eve-(n-ing)>, ON <ap-tann>, thus the
direction west
*H-p- > IE aw- > <east> (all the 'morning', 'sunrise' words)
extended with n-
*p-n- > German <von>, Semitic 'face'
Basque <ibar-alde> lit. 'valley-side' > 'north'
<ibar> is one of a group of words in Basque ending in <-ar> (plural?)
that has puzzled linguists. One of them Miguel mentioned was
<(h)ondar> "beach; sand, remains". Basque has also <ondo> "side,
bottom> which is also used as a postposition in that sense. Consensus
says this is a loan from Latin <fundu-> "bottom", but suppose
<ondo>/<ondar> is a pair (a beach is also a side, namely a sea- one).
Basque also has the postposition <ondaren> "after".
(I can't explain the rest of the Basque words in -ar; <bizar> 'beard'
unless it was forked will stay bizarre)
If this is so, <ondo> has relatives in IE and Semitic
http://www.angelfire.com/rant/tgpedersen/md.html
With a suffix -r (= Basque allative <-ar>?; Basque locative and
directional postpositions are nouns which are inflected in locative
and allative, with the noun they govern in the genitive) you get *n-
dh-r- > Latin <infer->, Germanic <under> (etc).
Other loose thoughts:
The Old European river suffix -ant- may be related.
Postpositions become preverbs (in an -OV language) by the process
N + postp. + verb >
N + preverb + verb
I heard of a case in which the Finnish adpositional construction
(structurally similar to the Basque one) occurred in the Swedish
speech of Finnish children in care there during the war: "i vagnens
under", lit. 'in the car's under', cf standard Swedish "under
vagnen" 'under the car'. If this Basque-like construction influenced
IE, it must have been at the time when prepositions (< adverbs)
became established. Note that many Latin prepositions (eg <ad>, <ab>,
<ap-ud>) have /a/, thus must have been borrowed in the /a/-poor time,
after the ablaut vowel became e/o.
Torsten