-le
| Morpheme | |
|---|---|
| Language: | Raetic |
| Type: | inflectional |
| Function: | Pertinentive |
|
| |
| Attestation: | azile, aθivnuale, )auþile, eθunnuale, esθuale, θaθivnuale, kaszrinuale, ketanuvale, laśanuale, )le, metlainile, )nuale, nuþnuale, perkusiale, piθamnuale, sletile, φelvinuale
|
Commentary
Corresponding to the Etruscan pertinentive II (Rix 1985: 128, Wallace 2008: 47). Like the ablative, the pertinentive is built with genitive forms as base (on the possibility of genitives originally being adjectives of posession, enabling them to serve as bases for cases, see Rix 1985: 127). The pertinentive is historically a locative to the genitive, hence the complex pertinentive endings reflect both those of genitive and locative. The pertinentive II is based on the genitive II -l, historically -la: -la-i > -le. In this context, the auslauting (umlauted) vowel survived apocope (while being lost in the genitive).
-le appears as -ale after the patronymic suffix -nu, which is indeed the usual context for the pertinentive II in Raetic. See -l(a) and Rix 1985: 126 f. on the origin and phonotactic context of -al(e) in Etruscan. The motivation for -le instead of expected pertinentive I -si in the other cases, all arguably individual names ending in vowels, is unclear.
