Thread:User talk:CodeCat/Proto-Indo-European/reply (46)

I think that the case endings were formed at different times, but the nominative and accusative are probably very old. There is a hypothesis called the Nostratic theory, which doesn't really have much support among linguists, that suggests that the Indo-European and Uralic nominatives are cognate, since they both end in -m.

There are also some possibilities for internal reconstruction, though. It is often suggested that the accusative plural ending -ns was formed from the singular -m with an additional plural ending -s, in which -ms was assimilated to -ns. The ablative ending -ead is thought to have been formed from the thematic vowel -e followed by an adverbial particle *ad (modern English ). Other case endings may have similar explanations, but the more "basic" cases seem harder to explain.

Finnish has a very rich set of endings but some of them are clearly related: It is generally believed that the latter four were formed from an infix -s- or -l- of some origin, suffixed by the old partitive and essive cases, which originally were ablative and locative in meaning: -s-na > -ssa, -s-ta, -l-na > -lla, -l-ta.
 * partitive -(t)a
 * essive -na
 * inessive -ssa
 * elative -sta
 * adessive -lla
 * ablative -lta