Jens:
> Then why does Brugmann bracket the r of *p&té:(r) and *k^uo:(n)? And
> why does Pokorny do the same? Because they saw no good reason? You
> are styling ignorance as a virtue.
Brugmann and Pokorny do a lot of things that they shouldn't have like
forget to reconstruct laryngeals (oops!) but they can be forgiven
because they lived in a different time with less knowledge than
we have now.
However, the absence of the final consonant of the stem here would
seem to not matter much because if this optional absence is produced
by sandhi conditions. Then it has no bearing on our topic which was
concerned only with these words in _isolation_.
In isolation, the words don't drop *r or *n which is why we can
reconstruct them in the first place! It merely drops the nominative
in *-s. You are bringing in this new issue but it's only clouding
the search for a solution.
Perhaps at best you're trying to explore how *-s might have
disappeared because of sandhi but I'm at a loss to know how this
might occur? Is that it, or does your mention of sandhi have no
logical relationship to any of this at all?
>> If it were sandhi then, it still doesn't mean that the stem lacks
>> these sonants in the nominative, but rather that in colloquial
>> speech they were omitted based on a context and rules external to
>> the stem as it would be found in isolation.
>
> Pray reveal to us the basis of your insight.
It may be as simple as: before another consonant, one would have
said *pxte:, instead of *pxte:r before a word beginning with a
vowel or in isolation. This then would say nothing about sound
changes per se or how the word changes in isolation, but rather
about how a word interacts in a larger sentence between other
words. I mean, hell, that variation happens in just about every
language known to humankind. In English, I might say "I ate those
apples" with "those" being pronounced [dOz] instead of [TOz] in
isolation simply because of the effect that the preceding final
"t" of "ate" has on that word!
But who cares about that when we're talking about the word itself,
how it declines and the origin of these declensional forms?
How does sandhi relate to this?
>> Nominative loss as a result of sandhi would be outside of the topic
>> of nominative loss within the stem itself. */Tod ?so:nts estne/?
>
> No, that's not necessarily true (and "that" is not masculine), we
> have to keep all possibilities open as long as we know too little to
> be able to control them.
You haven't established how sandhi relates to this, so until you
do, why introduce trivia to confuse the topic?
PS: */_Nu_ so ?so:nts estne/? :)
= gLeN