Abstract
The term ‘heteroclisis’ refers to a combination of r- and n-stems found in a small group of Indo-European neuter nouns called heteroclitics (e.g. Lat. femur ‘thigh’, gen. femin-is, Gk. húdōr ‘water’, gen. húdat-os from *húdn̥t-os). It could be that the stem formant -r/n- reconstructible for PIE on the basis of Greek and other archaic IE languages is a relic of a pre-PIE classifier system.
A combination of r- and n- stems is found in a small group of Indo-European neuter nouns called heteroclitics. The r-stem appears only in the nom.…