I was wondering if it was possible to merge properties specified in a child document type into a tab specified in the parent that it is inheriting from?

I suspect the answer is no as, when inheriting document types, the parents tabs are not available in the dropdown list in the child; also I have tried creating a tab with the same name in the child document type but this results in two tabs with the same name when viewing a page based on that type in the content explorer; but I thought I'd ask anyway.