Re: Ablative/-to

Hi, Jim:
Thank you for your further comments on /-to/. I had firmly belived that
/-to/ is the other way of expressing ablative case than using the
regular ablative case endings, and never thought that it could mark
other cases. It is however, true that (with retrspective) I had had
an uneasy feeling with /-to/ and a neive doubt about its significance
(of being an ablative case marker). (Sanskrit doesn't seem to have
this kind of affixes.) Do you think there is any way we can trace the
etimological origin of /-to/?  I think it is a type of so-called
grammaticalization (i.e., the attribution of a grammatical character
to a once automomous  word). (Do we not have any Prakrit
specilists on the web?)
tadao