Dative/Locative, areal influence? (was: [tied] Bader's article on *

About the locative and dative in *-i and *-ei respectively, I
had an interesting idea as I was thinking about IE and MIE
through the aspect of the wave model. It got real trippy but
one of the things that dawned on me was that Tyrrhenian,
which I figured must have had a locative in *-i and a dative
in *-e since it shows up in Minoan and EtruscoLemnian, looks
a lot like IE... and yet, they can't be inherited from Indo-
Tyrrhenian.

I know, I know. This is a big conjecture but I have to get this
following idea off my chest.

I was thinking that maybe Tyrrhenian *-i and *-e was the impetus
for IE's adoption of *-i and *-ei. They simply borrowed the
case endings from it. This would be relatively easy to do
considering that, at the time, Tyrrhenian and IE would still
be somewhat intelligible, like French and Spanish let's say.

It would help if (and this is where the Wave Model comes in)
there were "inter-dialects" or languages that were not quite
Tyrrhenian and not quite IE that lied in between the two. In
my megavision of the IE Wave Model, Tyrrhenian lies to the
west and south of IE into Greece while IE itself runs
from the north and west of the Black Sea, right down, almost
to the Bosperus (Anatolian). So we should expect the dative
and locative to have especially taken over the northern areas
of the IE community at around 4500 BCE through influence from
Tyrrhenian then.

That could then explain and date the endings while also doing
the same for Tyrrhenian. On the other hand, it could makes
sense the other way as well where IE affects Tyrrhenian. Dunno.

Just a thought anyways. Have fun with that idea.


= gLeN