Peter,
I fail to see how the terminations -/é/ or -/í/ of the preterite and
-/o/ of the present tense in Spanish can both refer to the same
first-person /yo/. I don't see how the -/aste/ or -/iste/ termination
of the second-person preteriste can be traced to the pronounce -/tú/.
Does one have to go into the proto-languages to view this stage in
development? ...
... If so, then it is still mostly conjectural, since thereYou are welcome to hold the epistemological and methodological position that it is impossible to make any kind of reconstruction of languages which have not survived in writing. But in that case you cannot make claims like "it just doesn't seem to be how language works", only ones like "we have no idea how language works and no way of finding out".
is no example of any Proto-Indo-European language at play anywhere in
real world. It is a reconstruction (as even you state) rather than a
practical demonstration.
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