The Inflection of the Verb *melti ‘grind’ (< IE. *melh2-) in Slavonic.

The Slavonic verb *melti ‘grind’ has a regular je-present from the full stem. But in certain Church Slavonic texts, all of them very old, forms with a zero-grade are attested that are not mentioned in the handbooks. Apart from attested forms of the verb, the reconstruction of the imperfective derivatives of the verb (-milati ) also plays an important role. It turns out that the zero-grade forms—active preterit participles, innovative aorists built on the present stem as well as imperfective derivatives—probably go back to the Indo-European present with an alternation between full grade (-e- or -o-) vs. zero grade.