On 2006-01-20 17:30, tgpedersen wrote:
> And there I might pull Kuhn's argument out of the hat and claim that
> those forms were 'mots populaires' which appear late in written
> sources. Are there other reasons for that obviousiality?
Yes. Forms which may easily have arisen at any time thanks to a
productive analogical rule are more likely to be secondary than those
that show various irregularities and bear the fingerprints of old,
non-productive processes. For example, the regular past tense in English
is evidently less archaic than the marginally surviving ("irregular")
strong preterites. Also, why _should_ thematic nouns and adjectives be
de-compositional anyway?
Piotr