> Oh, and BTW: since *de-do:- "did, gave" etc is structurally similar to
> preverb + verb, a phony preverb/adverb/pre-/postposition *de "from,
> away" was abstracted from it.
Checking up on all this, I discovered something surprising about 'in':
it's not a pre-/post-/adverb/-position at all, but the locative of a
deictic pronoun! According to Ernout-Meillet, this is shown by Latin
inde "ex eo:, wherefrom" (-> French 'en', Spanish, Italian 'ne'),
where -de is the postposition (cf. unde where the first element must
be the same as of the one Slavic vn "in").
That makes *in (full grade O.Lat. en) the locative of a deictic pronoun.
The final -n would normally have become -r, cf. in-ter, but I suppose
the participation in many such compounds kept the -n variant current.
Therefore it must be cognate with the Dutch deictic pronoun 'er'
"there", and now I suddenly see a reason for the parallel use of a
partitive pronoun in Dutch and French, eg.
"Ik weet er niets over"
"Je n'en sais rien"
which always puzzled me. Common substrate in soldiers' Latin?
Torsten