From: Grzegorz Jagodzinski
Message: 45477
Date: 2006-07-22
----- Original Message -----
From: tgpedersen
To: cybalist@yahoogroups.com
Sent: Friday, July 21, 2006 4:30 PM
Subject: [tied] Re: Substrate in the Baltic
>> > Uralic languages outside of Baltic Fennic have no partitive,
>> > it appears from Abondolo.
>> OK, but the BF partitive is genetically ablative.
> What do you base that claim on?
AFAIK it is the general and non-questionable opinion in Uralistics (anyway
it is generally used in the literature known by me). And what is your
opinion? BTW, separative and ablative are synonyms (do you now a single
language which has different separative and ablative cases?), and I have
found nobody who would use the term "separative" for a name of a case.
"Separative" comes from the terms made by Latin grammarians who used it to
differentiate "ablativus locativus" from the proper ablative = "ablativus
separationis".
If you did not like my literature on Uralic in Russian (among others, by
Maytinskaya), Kortlandt also writes on Indo-Uralic -ta ablative, see e.g.
his "The Indo-Uralic Verb", available as a pdf:
http://www.kortlandt.nl/publications/art203e.pdf:
"The Proto-Uralic ablative suffix *-ta developed into a partitive in Finnish
and into an instrumental -l in Ugric"
>> All the other phenomena, including Acc = Gen in Finnish (except
some
>> pronouns), and Acc = Nom for some noun classes in Slavic, look
like
>> independently developed. It seems like simple phonetic rules, and
not
>> reciprocal influence, were the reason of them.
> Yes, if you believe phonetic processes are not goal-directed. The
> optionality of Dutch final -n makes it much easier to learn for a
> foreigner like myself than German which is much more literal-minded
> about same final -n.
What I believe is that Acc = Nom is a Slavic phenomenon which is not limited
in any way to inanimate nouns as you have suggested. It means that not all
inanimate nouns have Acc = Nom, and that there are animate nouns that have
Acc = Nom. In other words, there is no correlacy between the two phenomena:
1) Acc = Nom, and 2) animacy.
On the other hands, Acc = Nom in Finnish has also nothing to do with
animacy, and the second accusative, formally equal to nominative, is limited
to some syntactic constructions, not to some classes of nouns. This all
makes that I cannot see even one common point between Finnish and Slavic
here. All what is common is that some Acc = Nom, but all circumstances of it
are completely different in the two branches, and they seem to have nothing
to do with one another.
In Common Slavic the Open Syllable Rule was in use. It eliminated all
consonants that closed syllables - without any influence from Finnish. As
some nominatives ended with *-us (also from *-as < IE *-os), and some
accusatives ended with -um (also from *-am < IE *-om), those accusative and
nominative merged. A similar process was in some Germanic dialects. In fact,
also in Romance nominative and accusative are identical (except Old French).
And I really do not believe that any of the processes had anything in
common. In Romance nominative fell into disuse and was replaced by
accusative. In Germanic the reason may have been the tendency to reduction
of all endings (it was, as I believe, mainly not because of phonetic rules
but because frequency). In Slavic the Open Syllable Rule cancelled the
difference. And in Finnish... I just do not know what was the reason of the
origin of two forms of accusative, one of them is formally equal to
nominative. I am not enough advanced in Uralistics. But it can clearly be
seen from what I know that the reason cannot be the same as in Slavic.
Grzegorz J.
___________________________________________________________
Try the all-new Yahoo! Mail. "The New Version is radically easier to use" The Wall Street Journal
http://uk.docs.yahoo.com/nowyoucan.html