Classifying Semitic Broken Plurals (Explanation in the Comments)
u/Sigma_Linguist — 4 days ago
The Longest Running Myth of Semitic and Afroasiatic Reconstruction
The restriction against syllables beginning with a vowel is well known as an Afroasiatic phonotactical rule, Igor Diakonoff (Afrasian Languages, p. 42) states:
>“no syllable (including the initial) can begin with a vowel (hence the important part played by the phoneme /ʔ/, which is the principal substitute of the vocalic initial”
As people well acquainted with Afroasiatic linguistics will know, the idea of mandatory onsets is found in virtually every reconstruction – Though as I will set out to prove, it is wrong altogether both for PAA as well as Proto-Semitic, in fact I don’t believe any primary AA branch ever had such a restriction.
In Arabic, a glottal stop as well as the following vowel can be dropped in the beginning of some words when they occur after another vowel.
- fa "so" + ʔijlis "sit down!" -> fajlis "so sit down!"
- ʔana "I" + ʔibtasamtu "smiled" -> ʔanabtasamtu "I smiled"
- baytu "house" + ʔibnika "your son's" -> baytubnika "your son's house"
Yet in other words, no such thing happens
- ʔana "I" + ʔaktubu "write" -> ʔana ʔaktubu "I write"
When words of group 1 are compared with other Semitic languages, there is no glottal stop at all and the vowel trades places with the following consonants
- Arabic ʔibnu vs Hebrew ben, Akkadian biinum "son"
- Arabic ʔuzmur vs Akkadian zumur "sing!"
It is generally assumed here, that Arabic underwent metathesis in these words, and the glottal stop was later added epenthetically. Elitzur Avraham Bar-Asher(The Imperative Forms of Proto-Semitic and a New Perspective on Barth’s Law p. 4) says:
>"in all the imperative forms a metathesis occurred"
While I agree that the glottal stop is due to later epenthesis, it is problematic to assume that it is Arabic that actually metathesized these formations, because there is no clear criteria for when this metathesis occurs and when it doesn't, syllable weight, vowel quality and other factors are irrelevant. Instead I propose that items such as *bin "son" *sim "name" *ti- [reflexive prefix] and the imperative patterns 1i2i3, 1i2a3 and 1u2u3 were actually *ibn, *ism *it- and i12i3, i12a3 & u12u3, syllables truly starting with a vowel.
Akkadian then metathesized the initial vowel with the following consonant consistently, while NWS did so everywhere except in the reflexive prefix it-. Arabic on the other hand did generally not undergo metathesis, except sporadically in words like bintu "girl" from *ibnatu.
I propose that syllables lacking both an onset and a coda were banned in PS due to Arabic forms such as qul "say!" instead of otherwise expected ʔuqul.
The "smoking gun" evidence, however really comes from other Afroasiatic branches, where imperatives are similarly formed with a prefix vowel, suggesting this feature to be archaic:
| Perfect 3 masc. sg. | Imperative | |
|---|---|---|
| Saho (Cushitic) source | yee-rheg-e | i-rhig |
| Tuareg (Berber) source | y-bdad | e-bded |
An interesting curiosity, but very useful for proving Afroasiatic allowed these onset-less syllables is the fact that the quality of these vowels is very likely to be /i/, which is rather rare for non-root final vowels in Proto-Semitic. In fact, in Semitic words of the shape CiCVC, V is only allowed to be /a/. The only case where the quality is /u/, is if another /u/ follows, as in *uktub "write!". According to Newman, Proto-Chadic had the following vowel distribution:
>"PC was characterized by the same type of distributional restrictions that one finds in present-day Chadic languages. Thus no blanket statement that PC had this or that number of vowels would be correct as such.Rather, one would have to specify how many vowels and which vowels did PC have in initial position, how many and which vowels in medial position in open syllables, etc. In the re-constructions in this paper, I make use of all four vowels in final position, two vowels (i and a) in initial position, and, with a few exceptions, two vowels (ə and a) in medial position."
In Proto-Afroasiatic, a similar distribution would have occurred, which explains why /i/ is common word initially, but not in other non-final syllables in Proto-Semitic. With the cognate vowel distribution, we can infer that these vowel-initial morphemes and lexical items go back to Proto-Afroasiatic
u/Sigma_Linguist — 13 days ago
The Pre-Semitic Language, A Small Reconstruction
Proto-Afroasiatic is considered to be the eldest reconstructible proto-language in the world, estimatedly spoken 10000 to 20000 years into the past. This considerable time scale as well as the poor attestation of certain branches means that there is almost no consensus on any aspect of this proto-language, aside from a few affixes and its head-initial word order. In order to dodge these issues, I will use the method of internal reconstruction and limit myself to only the most well attested Semitic branch. Internal reconstruction works by finding oddities or irregularities within a language. Then, a more regular stage of the language plus a sound change is posited, thus revealing both the sound change and the earlier structure of the language. This method I will now use to reconstruct the syllable structure for Proto-Semitic’s ancestor.
In Semitic languages, the D-stem is a verbal derivation marked by doubling of the middle root consonant, signifying an intensive or causative meaning of the root. For example, from the root *ʕabara, yaʕbur, meaning “to cross”, derives *ʕabbara, yuʕabbir, meaning “to get (sth) across” or “to cause some (sth) to cross”
If we now want to derive a verbal noun from *ʕabbara, we can apply the D-stem VN-pattern ta12ii3. The root consonants are slotted into the numbers, producing *taʕbiir. The oddity here is that the middle root consonant is no longer doubled, and this pattern is not paralleled in other derivations either.
A pattern like *taʕbbiir would indeed not be possible, as Proto-Semitic’s syllable structure is CV{C, ː}, thus no triple clusters are permitted. But this leads me to ask: What if triple consonant clusters were originally allowed, but later banned, thus degeminating *taʕbbiir into *taʕbiir?
Indeed, there is more to this idea: Active imperfective participles in Proto-Semitic are formed on the pattern 1aa2i3, as such a verb such as paʕala “to do” becomes paaʕil “doing”. What’s interesting here is that these participles can take a broken plural(=formed via ablaut) pattern 1u22aa3, such that paaʕil “doing” becomes puʕʕaal “doing (pl.)”. You might be thinking that the gemination of the middle root consonant is indicating the plurality here, but the association of “consonant doubling = plural” isn’t found in a singular other broken plural pattern, despite dozens of these patterns existing. (eg. compare this)
In fact, the consonant doubling actually indicates the imperfective nature of the participle, which is paralleled by imperfective verb patterns such as ya1a22a3, forming verbs such as yapaʕʕal “he is doing”. This, in turn poses the question: Why is there no gemination in the singular imperfective participle faaʕil, but in the plural fuʕʕaal, there is? Well, since the syllable structure CV{C, ː} would disallow long vowels in closed syllables, a pattern faaʕʕil would be phonotactically illegal. As above, I posit once again that faaʕʕil was indeed the original pattern, and that later sound change reduced it to faaʕil. (ps. The reason why the pattern fu33aal doesn’t have a long uu vowel is because of the restriction against two long vowels in a word, see Joshua Fox – Semitic noun patterns p.287)
My final piece of evidence is that final double consonants are also degeminated, compare how Akkadian has šarrum for the nominative but šar for the absolute state.
I thus propose that the Pre-Semitic coda originally allowed both two consonant clusters, as well as that long vowels were allowed in closed syllables. I propose the following sound shift:
Cː → C / {Vː,C}_,_#
though I believe the environments #_,_C were probably affected as well on systemic grounds.
ps. For some more reconstruction, check my post history. I posted about this once before but rewrote some of it to be more explicit and captivating.
u/Sigma_Linguist — 18 days ago
Reconstruction of Pre Semitic
This article I wrote discusses some of the pre-history of Proto-Semitic.
u/Sigma_Linguist — 24 days ago