5 posts tagged “semitic”

As the title says, I am often perplexed by afro-asiatic. I've learned some Arabic and Hebrew, followed a class on comparative semitic, I have a (hardly looked at) book on Egyptian, and I'm currently following a class on Riffian Berber and general Berber Linguistics.

Studying these languages it seems silly to deny that Proto-Afro-Asiatic must have existed. So I won't. But what always puzzles me, is the fact that unlike Indo-European the 'proof' for Afro-Asiatic is quite the opposite of what kind of proof we find in Indo-European.

Lexical items in Afro-Asiatic that are cognate, are extremely hard to find. This is quite the opposite in Indo-European, where lexical items were the first things to catch the attention of a certain relation between the languages.

But the morphology of Afro-Asiatic is disturbingly similar. Obvious are things like -t suffix for the feminine, but even personal endings of verbs are surprisingly similar in Afro-Asiatic.

This is completely unlike Indo-European. Sure Sanskrit and Greek grammatically are almost clones of each other, but I make it no secret that I believe that the relation between Sanskrit and Greek is a lot closer than some people claim. But reconstructing a uniform image of the verbal system or even morphology when comparing Sanskrit to, say, Germanic, stuff gets a lot more confusing.

And then we're talking about Germanic and Sanskrit. The time depth of Indo-European is a LOT less than that of Afro-Asiatic. Is there something inherent to the way the language's  structure which makes morphemes more resistant to change? That seems odd, structurally you could argue Indo-European at an early stage (but post-syncope) was quite similar to Afro-Asiatic languages.

Of course this 'morphological but not lexical' change resistance is more of a 'feeling' I get, then anything I ever measured. So maybe I'm wrong about this. Maybe Afro-Asiatic is just as innovating in the morphological department as Indo-European, but just a whole lot more innovating in the lexical department.

This is me just rambling to a point that it's appallingly unscientific, but I guess it'll set some of your brains into motion, and that'll be enough. :-P

I've written about vocalised in Arabic and how this can almost impossible represent the stage of language as it is written. Especially the case endings seem to have not existed in Arabic when the orthography as we know it now was brought into use.

In fact, I believe that the noun cases and nunation are most likely a result of a highly ritualistic language a 'high' language so to speak that was much closer to proto-semitic than the actual Arabic language. I believe that at the time Hebrew and Arabic split, Arabic can't have had case forms in the way we see them today. That's quite a claim, but let me elaborate.

Arabic and Hebrew are close in some ways and very divergent in others. Arabic broken plurals have run rampant for example. Nevertheless the amount of similar shifts that they seem to have undergone after Arabic lost it's noun endings and nunation is so absurdly similar to Hebrew that it's almost as if history redid some shifts it had lying around for those funny Semitic languages anyway.

I don't believe that's the case, I believe endings and nunation must have disappeared and then Arabic and Hebrew (and probably aramaic and a bunch of other languages of which I have too little knowledge) underwent a bunch of common changes.

Let's give some examples. Hebrew masculine plural ending is  -īm Arabic masculine plural is nom. -ūna gen./acc. -īna. As we can see a shift of m to n occurred and word final -a was lost. in hebrew while it didn't in Arabic. This makes little sense to me. But now if we look at the 'pausal' and modern pronunciation of these two endings of Arabic we find it without an -a. -ūn/-īn The shift of word final m > n is much more natural than m > n between a long vowel and a.

This word final m > n shift is actually also found in the nunation, which in proto-semitic must have been mimation. I call ritualistic endings that were not part of the real language. But they must have been in use in some contexts. And if a language gets a constraint of final m turning to n it's quite likely that it will abide to this.

But that's just one of many more things I wanted to show. Another point is the loss of the final *t in feminines in both Arabic and Hebrew. These days Arabic has a etymological ة which is simply a h with the dots of a t over it. But dots are a more recent innovation thus only an h was used. The exact same spelling Hebrew uses to write feminines.

The situation is somewhat different though, hebrew always uses a he to write long final a's, while in arabic this orthography is quite restricted. Nevertheless it makes no sense for an Arab to writen a word with a final h if it was pronounced -atun or even -at. Why not write a t? I believe that Arabic and Hebrew both had final *-at that was then simplified to *-a which was later even lengthened in Hebrew to ā.

The accusative indefinite singular -an in Arabic can not be old, unless you feel like an alif is a perfectly logical letter to write -an instead of -ā you'll surely agree. This is not that controversial, it's generally accepted that in Old-Arabic the accusative indefinite singular was probably pronounced -ā and that the -an was reintroduced by analogy of the other cases. I've been told, and I hope someone will back this up, that in colloquial dialects -ā is still the normal pronunciation of the accusative. I personally am unsure whether for Proto-Semitic -an or -ā is reconstruced. But Akkadian has -am. So I guess the development of -ā is a later feature. A feature that Arabic shares with... You guess it, Hebrew!

Now I can hear you guys saying: aha! you made a mistake! And it's true there's no true accusative in Hebrew, but there are some petrified forms. For example BBLH or bāḇĕlā means  'towards Babylon'. Once again then a common feature of Hebrew and Arabic.

This leaves us with one major issue of course. HOW can Arabic have a ritualistic language so much more archaic than the spoken languages alive simultaneously. I'd suggest you go to Egypt, and watch al-jazira while listening to the people around you talking, and you'll find out that this is not all that bizarre as it sounds. It's essentially the same situation as all those years ago.

Luckily there's also some analogies to be made outside of Arabic. What to think of Vedic Sanskrit still existing as an oral tradition well after Classical Sanskrit died, and when the Prakrit languages were alive and kicking?

Or the (somewhat controversial) idea of Runic inscriptions that often look almost proto-germanic while languages must have differentiated into the different germanic languages at the time we find those inscriptions? It's pretty odd that in Old-Norse region not much before the first latin-written attestation we still find runic inscriptions that write the nom. sg. as -az rather than -r.

So this is the point where I ask you: Am I crazy? Am I seeing things? Surely these similarities can't just be coincidence can they? I'm open to all words of praise, critique and whatever else, as long as it doesn't change into a ridiculous mudfight. I want to be proven wrong, or someone to kindly point out that this interpretation has been the status-quo for centuries and has somehow gone past me.

[EDIT]

I should probably add that there's no direct reason to assume that there was no nominative -u and genitive -i or definite accusative -a. Since we also have to account for final vowels in the verbal system to explain certain vocalisms in Hebrew, this must have existed at some point. They may have been lost individually, or around the time that the two groups were starting to move away from each other.

[First of all, I'm a big fan of using the original script of languages, but seeing as Arabic can do some crazy stuff with displaying properly on computers I'll use transcription only today]

Classical Arabic has approximately 6 types of noun endings, which can be homophonous in some forms, but in the most basic paradigm there's 6 different forms.

For example the word man 'rajul'
Indefinite
nom rajulun
gen rajulin
acc rajulan

definite
nom ar-rajulu
gen ar-rajuli
acc ar-rajula

As you can see, when a noun is indefinite it is marked with an additional /n/, this is so called nunation. This goes way back to proto-semitic, where it was still an /m/, and thus apporpriately called mimation. Although in fully vocalised texts this nunation is incredibly clear, when we just look at the plain, unvocalised texts, it becomes a lot weirder.

Indefinite
nom RJL
gen RJL
acc RJLA

definite
nom ʔL-RJL
gen ʔL-RJL
acc ʔL-RJL

Where's the nunation now? It disappeared! In unvocalised writing, there's actually no proof that there is such a thing as nunation. And the spelling RJLA seems to indicate a word rajulaa (which incidentally was the form in Old Arabic, or so I've been told).

And although you could say 'that's simply a spelling convention', this is in fact very odd. Yes these days it's a spelling convention, but as some of you may know, Arabic exclusively writes consonants and long vowel. I think we can all agree that in fact this nunation represents consonants. Why then isn't the indefinite paradigm like this?:

nom RJLN
gen RJLN
acc RJLA (RLJN?)

I personally believe that the written Arabic doesn't actually represent the Classical Arabic language, but rather a later stage that already lost its nunation (like all following Arabic languages have).
So the people who first wrote the Arabic language had already lost this nunation, but I believe that there must have been some religious tradition that continued this grammatical structure, which had been long lost when the Arabs started writing.

This is not entirely without precedent, think of the Sanskrit Rig Veda, which retains a much more archaic form of Sanskrit than we find in other texts. Not because it had been written down earlier, it was written down around the same time as classical texts. But it was passed on orally for much longer than the other texts, with virtually no change to the original position, thus retaining arachaisms not seen anywhere else.

The situation isn't 100% the same, as the Rig Veda texts, indeed retained old archaisms, but the language was never used to compose new texts. Which seems to be the case in Arabic.

I know that this idea feels 'far out', but Arabic combines fantastically with the other Semitic languages like this. Hebrew for example also lost its nunation (and case endings all together), but has some vestiges of this /aa/  from the Accusative indefinite.

Take layla evening. This is, although it looks just like a feminine, in fact a masculine word. the -a  at the end is actually a retention of the Accusative indefinite long aa. Denoting 'during the night'. This is the exact same form that you see in writing of Arabic LYLA.

Although this all seems so crazy, I can't think of a good reason why nunation would not be written. Recognising that this nunation was a special grammatical ending, is way to linguistically deep to realise for the people who started writing it. That would be like Sanskrit using an s rather than an ḥ to denote the word final s, but then actually quite a bit more extreme.

I've looked for Old Arabic sources, hoping to find some nunation there, but even in those text it seems to be absent (although it's incredibly hard to tell).

One explantion often seen as to why nunation isn't written, and why the ending -an is written as -aa, is that written arabic is written 'pausal' The way you'd write the word in an individual context. This also explains the unpronounced Alif al-Waṣl (Connextive alif). I don't buy it though. In earlier texts for example, the Alif al-Waṣl was not actually written, because in many contexts it was unpronounced. So if back then they didn't write pausally, why didn't they write nunation?

I don't need any of you to agree with this idea, but what I'd like to hear from readers with at least some knowledge of Semitic, is a plausible explanation why nunation wasn't written.

A question which you have probably never heard is "Do you speak Abaric", though there are singals that once maybe the word for Arabic should have been Abaric. What brought me to this thought is the Hebrew word for the Hebrew language 'ivrit' Or עברית in Hebrew. The Arabic word for the Arabic is 'ʕArabiyya' عربيّة. both -iyya and -it go back to a same suffix which was something like *-iyyat-um. which leaves us with the stems respectively עבר  ʕ-b-r and عرب ʕ-r-b.

It's almost unthinkable to think that ʕ-b-r and ʕ-r-b do not go back to the same proto-root. Only one of these two languages must have metathesized it. Problem is if course that I know of absolutely no other roots where this happens. Never the less it's rather odd to think it didn't.

I just looked up both roots in my fantastic Arabic dictionary (The Hans Wehre dictionary of Modern Written Arabic), turn out both the root ʕ-b-r and ʕ-r-b exist in Arabic, with not an uncommon meaning.

ʕabara: to cross, to traverse; to ford, wade; to swim; to pass; to ferry; to carry someone across or over some thing; etc. etc.

ʕaraba: This word has taken a strong meaning to be connected with the Arabic nationality and has meanings like 'to translate into Arabic, to Arabicise etc. But in my dictionary there seems to be some indication of the original meaning if we look at the female noun derivation with suffix -atun

ʕarabatun: swift river; carriage, vehicle, wagon, cart; car, coach

So this also seems to have something to do with crossing/transporting. There's a very odd correlation here. Some of the derivations of the first root seem to refer to the latter root. And the other way around.

I don't have much to add to this, just thought I'd let you see the funny words and their similarities.

Arabic has a very odd quirk. It has so called 'broken plurals', besides the normal plurals, which are simply a suffixed form of the singular, there's plurals which consist of the same root, but vowels just in different places.

An example of this is to be seen in the title 'aflām' أفلام is the plural of 'fīlm' فيلم that's right, it's the loanword 'film'. From this even today, we can conclude that broken plurals are a productive category of the Arabic language. There's several common patterns, and several very rare ones. Which word takes a broken plural and which one takes a 'sound' plural is completely irregular. There's of course some indication, feminine nouns tend to have sound plurals, but this is by no means a fixed rule. Also which pattern goes with which noun is unpredictable.

Experience in historical linguistics teaches us that what are now irregularities were probably once regular patterns which got lost over time. To find such regularities you look back at other languages from the same language family. But here it gets disturbing.

The other Central Semitic languages (which include the languages Hebrew and Aramaic) have next to no indication of so called broken plurals. They're only sound plurals. In fact the split of the Central Semitic groups is done based on the existence of broken plurals:

There are two branches of Central Semitic, North-West Semitic and Arabic (The should really work on their terminology). The greatest distinguishing factor is the appearance of broken plurals in Arabic.

This gives the impression that the so called broken plural patterns just 'emerged' out of no where. This is hard for me to accept. A completely irregular system to create plurals while there was, and still is a perfectly regular system in the proto-language is very hard to accept.

There is no good reason why such a group of plurals would be created. The best explanation would be that a broken plural usually has fewer syllables, but this need for brevity would have also worked if they had just generalised one broken plural pattern instead of several.

Due to the unlikelihood that Arabic just sprouted irregular plurals, I'd like to think that Central Semitic in fact did have broken plurals, maybe not as wide spread as in Arabic, but definitely a big enough number of words to become productive. Then Aramaic and Hebrew generalised the simpler Sound Plural, while the broken plural became productive in Arabic.

I suspect that, at one point the different broken plural patterns attributed to some kind of class system, similar as you see in Bantu languages (maybe this is even areal influence?). Later this distinction become lost, especially in Arabic where several patterns became quite randomly productive.

Maybe the sound plural was an alternative way of forming a plural. Possibly when the speaker didn't feel it was necessary to categorise the plural into a class. Or maybe when he was speaking of a group of these things in general. There's countless  scenario's you could think of to explain a 2 types of plurals system within one language.

If anyone has another idea, or can make the 'broken plurals sprung out of nowhere' idea sound plausible, please do reply.