Suboptimist

Brilliance.

January 25, 2007 – 12:13 am

Sorry, I’ve been busy. This semester is looking tough so far. However, I am learning some pretty nifty things. I look forward to relaying accquired knowledge to you in the near future. For now, let me discuss what I have been reading for structure of Arabic.

Triconsonantal verb morphemes in Semitic languages (in the pattern of C₁C₂C₃) C₁ and C₂ are not typically identical. In Arabic, for example, such roots don’t exist at all. An identical C₂ and C₃ is permissible, however, and occur regularly. So, we see roots like ∫kk ‘to doubt’ in Arabic, but not *∫∫k. The existence and non-existence of certain root patterns led Jospeh Greenberg (1950) to investigate all possible combinations. Here is a summary of what he found:

· In addition to prohibitions of geminates in C₁C₂ positions, homorganic consonants are prohibited. No Semitic language would have *bm- or *gk- (where both are velars) in addition to *kk-.

· In C₂C₃ positions, homorganic consonants are marked, though attested, but geminates are allowed. In Arabic, we find the root ∫kk, though not ∫gk.

· There is an exclusion, though not as rigorous as the preceding constraints, of C₁___C₃ homorganic consonants, including identical consonants. We do see a few instances of such roots. For example, qlq ‘to be confused’ in Arabic and prm ‘to tear’ in Syriac (where the first and third radical are labials).

Let’s see how well that stands up to the numbers Greenberg crunched (I am using the examples of labials) from a collection of 3775 Arabic roots [root (occurence)]:

C₁C₂

· bf- (0).

· bb- (0).

· bm- (0).

· ff- (0).

· fb- (0).

· fm- (0).

· mf- (0).

· mb- (0).

· mm- (0).

C₂C₃

· -bf (0).

· -bb (22) (geminates are allowed here).

· -bm (1).

· -ff (19).

· -fb (0).

· -fm (0).

· -mf (0).

· -mb (0).

· -mm (0).

C₁C₃

· b-f (0).

· b-b (1).

· b-m (5).

· f-f (1).

· f-b (0).

· f-m (11).

· m-f (0).

· m-b (0).

· m-m (0).

So…as al-Ghawalki said, “As regards Arabic formation, he most excellent are formed by letters which are distant in their points of formation.” Pretty nifty I think. Oh, and if this is hard to parse, keep in mind that I haven’t been sleeping much lately.

Greenberg, Joseph H. 1950. Patterning of Root Morphemes in Semitic. Word 3: 162-180.