I've seen Torsten mention this a few times. I've also never seen anyone else even suggest thisÂ…
From the "dive" topic:
> 1. For "have", Slavic has a prepositional phrase with a locality
> preposition, Finnic has a local case (neither has dative as in
> Latin)
> 2. For the object of negative statements Slavic uses genitive,
> Finnic partitive.
> 3. Slavic m.n. genitive is derived from the old PIE ablative which
> ended in -t, the Finnic partitive suffix is *-ta (IIRC)
>
> And I'm talking all of Slavic.
I don't see how that suggests a substrate. But I will admit however my overall grasp of syntax is poor. So I would appreciate to hear what other think of these arguments?
(In the context of a substrate for all of Slavic, that is. A Uralic substrate in northern/central Russian is quite estabilish'd.)
For 2 & 3: NB that the Finnic partitiv also descends from an Uralic ablativ, so if we interpret this as influence it can go either way. Also the phonetical similarity (cognancy?) of these case-markers exists between IE and Uralic as a whole, not just Finnic and Slavic.
Also, what does Baltic do here?
---
As far as the standard view goes, the southern limit of historical Baltic-Finnic extent is Northern Latvia. See eg. the toponymic discussion here:
http://onomaural.klte.hu/onomural/kotetek/ou4/03balode.pdf
(And if the point is supposed to be one of a different Uralic substrate, Baltic-Finnic syntactic features aren't relevant.)
John Vertical