On Mon, 9 Aug 2004, Miguel Carrasquer wrote:
>
> There was no early reduction -yy- > -y-, otherwise we would
> have had *isto:(s) instead of isti:us.
Why do you persist when it has already been conceded that there is a
zone of analogy in it? Surely isti:us can only be reconciled with the
sy-based derivation of the a:-subjunctive if its ending has been restored
on the model of the eiius type. I have already said that this is
necessary, just as Gothic antharai and blindai are analogical on thai.
This is a "problem" of the most trivial kind. With this dose of
commonplace analogy it seems indeed possible to assume that *-sy- yields
-yy- after the first (short?) vowel of a word, and *-y- after non-first
vowel (mora). That's all it takes, Anders Joergensen has pointed out.
Jens