Re: [tied] Odd(?) Low German verb inflection

>> >If one believes that this weird preterite is caused by loss of the
>> >preterite -d- there's no major problem. It's just that I can't see
>> >what phonological conditions might have caused the loss of something
>> >with so much semantic load?
>> It happens. E.g. the loss in late Latin of the distinction between
>> future and perfect, leading to a need to create new tenses for both.
>> (/b/ fell with /v/, so, e.g., amabit and amavit became
>> indistinguishable.)
>>But the change there makes phonological sense; it's not like I'm
>against phonologically caused loss of morphological categories on
>principle.

What extra motivation do you need for the loss of a final phoneme? It is
such a common pattern in languages. Final /t/ is now regularly lost in some
dialects of English.

Peter