Lars Henrik Mathiesen wrote:
> > Why have both morphological cases (inflections)
> > and also have prepositions?
>
> Well, so does Greek, Germanic, Celtic,... Redundancy is one possible
> answer. But note that some prepositions can govern two cases, with
> different meaning, so it's not quite useless.
I wouldn't dare to call any language feature useless.
The uses are often very subtle though. In this instance,
not so subtle:
> > Were the prepositions
> > "originally" (there was no true origin I suppose)
> > adverbs?
>
> That's the assumption. The IE noun cases had quite vague senses when
> used alone (not as a core argument of the verb), and adverbs were
> often used to specify more precisely the relation of these non-core
> nouns to the verb action. So they were reinterpreted as prepositions.
Now it makes more sense to me. (If it was happening already in PIE.)
> > Apparently they also glued them onto verbs
> > to make productive series like in-* and pro-* etc.
> > Odd, because this pattern does not extend back
> > into PIE.
>
> Says who? Verb prefixes occur in Samskrta (the name itself is an
> example), Slavic, Greek, Germanic, Celtic, and probably in the
> branches I don't know about too. It's true that no prefixed verb forms
> are normally reconstructed specifically for PIE, but that does not
> mean they were not used then.
OK, they used different adverbs ... makes sense too.
> And I think I once saw a list of examples where different branches had
> the same (non-obvious) meaning for specific prefix-verb combinations,
> which would point to that meaning being 'invented' in PIE times.
Sometimes I get a really good answer ... poly-thanks.