>--- Piotr Gasiorowski <piotr.gasiorowski@...>
>wrote:
>
> ><kupfern> or <silbern> are of
> >course based on <Kupfer> and <Silber> and should be
> >cut into <kupfer-n> and <silber-n> accordingly.
>
>*****GK: Would this mean that, other problems aside,
>"Blacher-n" would be morphologically correct?****
Piotr's explanation makes sense. I didn't know how old this
German -ern might be. That's why I put my question. But
meanwhile I... googled a bit and found a German grammar
site: there, although no explanation on history or derivation
is given, it is stated unambiguously that the main & normal
"material suffix" (Stoffsuffix) in German is "-en" (or "-n"),
(gülden, golden, marmorn, graniten, eichen). So, then "hölzern",
"knöchern", "ledern" must be "Hölzer+n", "Knöcher-n", "Leder+n".
(Anyway, in modern German, the -r- in the -ern variant is
barely pronounced or not at all, so...)
George