Germanic and Balto-Slavic Morphology

[David L. White]

        When people say that Germanic and Balto-Slavic have a common
morphology (which if interpreted literally is absurd), are they talking
about anything other than the dative plurals in /m/ rather than /b/?  That
is not much to hand one's hat on, in part because it could conceivably have
arisen (as I pointed out long ago before my swan-dive into dissertation
slogging) by suffixing /bhis/ (or whatever) to the accusative rather than
the stem.  Since in neuter singulars the accusative IS the stem, ambiguity
and re-analysis are plausible.  In other words there is no reason to posit a
mysterious dative plural suffix in /m/ just for Germanic and Balto-Slavic,
as is traditionally done.
        A point of contact between the two that should also be noted, though
as far as I know it never has been, is that both have developed what might
be called "short form" and "long form" adjectives, with the distribution of
these being controlled by syntactic factors related to definiteness.
However, the suffixes used are entirely different. Common tendency?  Common
substrate?  It is clear (to me anyway) that there is Uralic substratal
influence in Balto-Slavic, but as far as I know Uralic could not be a source
for this.  Does some one out there know if it could be, or if not what else
could be?

                                                    Dr. David L. White