>You are talking to me like I'm five years old.
I certainly didn't intend to! I'm sorry if it came across like that.
I wasn't trying to tell you what you don't know - I was identifying the
particular point of confusion for me, so that you could (hopefully) clarify
it, which you have done.
(a) You now say that you see both the -n- infix and the -o- infix as
metathesised, one a metathesised suffix, the other a metathesised prefix. I
don't believe you had said that before - hence my search for an explanation.
(b) You also repeated what I had missed in reading, that you believe the -o-
grade in the perfect is different from the -o- grade in nouns and
causatives.
So what I understand your suggestion to be now is this:
For causatives, the sequence:
****men-éye-ti > *** mn-éye-ti > ** o-mn-éye-ti > *mon-éyeti.
and for nouns, something similar, with accent on the thematic vowel.
Or have I misunderstood?
This, I believe raises other problems. (I've pinched the examples from
Sszemerenyi.)
(a) What of forms without thematic vowel, such as (in Greek) eupáto:r,
dysáno:r, áfro:n, dó:to:r, daímo:n, génos, and the forms with -eh2 such as
forá?
(b) What of those where the -o- grade takes the accent, such as fóros, fó:r,
aidó:s, gónu?
(c) Why should the initial combination gn- be a problem in nouns (leading to
o-gn) when it is not in verbs?
Peter