On 2006-09-19 20:45, tgpedersen wrote:
> That PNS thing suffers from the problem that it gobbles up the
> *n before anyone sees it. How do you know it was there in the
> first place?
It doesn't gobble up the *n -- it's partly gobbled up later as a result
of Nasal Assimilation (Kluge's Law), but survives after long vowels and
diphthongs, as in the showcase example *taikna- < *doik^-n-ó-. Then,
there are lexical alternations like *knuþ- ~ *knuð- (commonly with nasal
extensions) ~ *knuttan- 'knot', where the last form may be explained as
analogical (from the pattern (*gnut-on-/*gnut-n- > *knuþ/ð-an-/*knutt-).
Piotr