Merger reversed

[Henry M. Hoenigswald]

Reversed merger is not a matter for empirical confirmation or
disconfirmation. In their haphazard but productive fashion, the
nineteenth-century scholars devised a framework (still uncritically used,
and, incidentally, uncritically used by them in the first place) in which
there is no room for reversal of merger by 'sound-change' (='a replacement,
along a line of descent,  such that it can be stated without naming
particular morphs').  By their lights,  there was either no merger, or
there is more than one line of descent.  There are no doubt other possible
frameworks but they have not been explored;  maybe for good reasons maybe
not.   HMH