A loose thought on present n-infix, ablaut

Some have proposed that PIE *bh, *b, p etc were actually *b *'b, *p
etc, so that the voiced unaspirated stops were really
preglottalized. Pulleyblank (Historical and Prehistorical
Relationships of Chinese, in Wang(ed.) The Ancestry of the Chinese
Language) proposes instead that they were nasal, thus: *n,W > *gW,
*n, > *g, n,Y > *g´ etc, which would fit his idea that Chinese and
IE are related in the case of Old Chinese *n,W`&G = PIE *gWow- (and
mine that it's a loan into early PIE). The exception to the rule
would be that *m > *b did not happen (and *n > *d requires us to
find other sources for PIE *n, but aren't a lot of the roots with *n-
suspiciously "international", *nu, *nom- etc?), which would explain
the lack of *b's in PIE. Also, in the supposed loan of Latin
baculus, bacillus "staff", with the un-IE /b/ and /a/, to Basque
makilla id., the Latin word would be instead be a loan from some
northwestern(?) language in which *m > *b did happen, and the Basque
one a loan from some IE language where it didn't.

The sg. of the hi- of perfect inflection is
*-x-e
*-tx-e
*-e

where *-e is obviously a suffix.
So in at least one form of the perfect stem, namely the important
3rd sg, the stem was without any suffix. AFAIK this is never the
case with the present stem, not even in the *-t-less forms of 3rd
sg. This might have been important in a remote past when the verb
was not inflected for number and person and today's 3rd sg. was used
for all.

So, in a verb with a stem ending in a voiced unaspirated, ie per
hypothesis prenasalised stop (here written D) and having the ablaut
vowel (here written A, since it was probably an /a/ in Proto-PIE) as
stem vowel, we would have (X some suitable sequence of consonants, V
some vowel)

present stem:
*XADV- > *XandV- > (syllabification) *Xan-dV- > *Xen-dV-

perfect stem:
*XAD > *Xand > (syllabification) *Xand > *Xãd > *Xõd > *Xod

which would explain both the present infix and ablaut, which is
nice. Obviously, both would have to have been reinterpreted as
morphological processes and generalised to other stems, but such has
happened before

Now, I have a vague recollection that Miguel did something similar
here on cybalist with a's and aN's recently, which impressed me much
but I didn't understand half of, and a nagging doubt that it was
something similar to the above, but I can't find a reference.


Torsten