--- In
cybalist@yahoogroups.com, enlil@... wrote:
> It doesn't matter anyway because quantitative ablaut was a
> process that went on for centuries before and after Syncope,
> as far as I'm concerned. So both *-men and *-mn, like all
> other suffixes, could be seen in the various derivatives
> and paradigms throughout that period. There's nothing to
> explain.
Your Syncope *is* quantitative ablaut under a partly new name.
Surely *-mn cannot be generated before the process that led to zero-
grade had occurred.
And the question was: When that process had later ceased to be a
phonetic one, having instead become one of pure analogy, how could
*later* formations that were only made after that time, as you say
about suffixal derivatives, also be zero-graded? What allomorphs can
there have been to introduce by analogy? This is completely and
utterly absurd.
Jens