Comments on: The complicated morphology of the Semitic binyanim

By: Peter Bekins

Peter Bekins — Sat, 14 Feb 2009 13:44:51 +0000

I think it is an issue of frequency. My dictionary says that “to water” can be used transitively with plants or animals. We urbanites don’t water very many animals, and I’ve never heard anyone say “I need to water the dog.” I wonder if that is because we consider dogs and cats a step closer to people than other animals?

By: David Kummerow

David Kummerow — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 20:50:13 +0000

I was wondering about that when I posted. I wonder what the extent of the acceptability of (1b) might be? Maybe it is just Aussie English, or even rural Aussie English (given that I grew up in rural Australia.

(1b) for me is acceptable for inanimate objects (as for you with “plants”) but would seem to be extended to animates as well, as in (1b). Human referents are unacceptable. That is, I cannot say “I watered my son from a cup”.

By: Peter Bekins

Peter Bekins — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 12:08:25 +0000

Yeah, but for some reason in my personal idiolect I reserve “to water” for plants. I never liked the sound of sentences like 1b. On the other hand, that’s another good example of how denominatives tend to become causatives.

By: David Kummerow

David Kummerow — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 02:57:32 +0000

Causative of “to drink” may sometimes be able to be rendered thus:

1a. The cattle drank at the river.
1b. He watered (ie, “caused to drink”) the cattle at the river.

By: Carl Pace

Carl Pace — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 23:57:58 +0000

Of course I don’t know anything about Tuareg (or Kabyle); I was just culling an example from Zaborski’s argument, which is of course more his than mine.

Volkswagen…funny. I suppose the ad must go something like “Everyone’s favorite Afroasiatic dialect is now the cutting edge of German technology…”

I see what you mean about the idea of “shelf life”, though that puts us in a place of dependence on another theory. I certainly have aligned myself with Kaufman’s views, but as you know, it is not easy for any of us to enter into contest about such issues with those who don’t agree with Kaufman. It is at times like this that I wish he would put more into writing, so that we could better see the structure of his thinking and the evidence that he would bring to bear for his argument.

The issue of the origin of the iparras-type present-future is certainly a contested issue. Zaborski is, as you could guess, not the only one who believes that there was a proto-semitic form /yVqattVl/, thought there are many varieties of this argument. Alice Faber (“Genetic Subgrouping of the Semitic Languages” in Hezron, The Semitic Languages) believes that the present-future yaqtulu was not a Proto-Semitic form, but rather an innovation that can be used to define the so-called “Central Semitic” family of dialects (a classification that Kaufman, among others, does not believe in). Zaborski sees the /yVqattVl/ form as Proto-Semitic, but he also leaves some room for the existence in Proto-Semitic of the form /yaqtulu/, which he calles “Imperfective” (how very Slavic of him) and which he sees as lying behind the subordinating iprus-u form in Akkadian. In fact, he suggests that the development of /yaqtulu/ into a subordinating form in some of the Semitic languages follows a known pattern of linguistic development.

As for a conclusion, Zaborski just deals with a variety of forms and tries to trace their development backwards toward Proto-Semtic, but never comes to an overall conclusion. I hope all of this helps to contextualize my previous comment better.

By: Peter Bekins

Peter Bekins — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 11:53:03 +0000

Carl, do you really know anything about Tuareg? I thought it was a Volkswagen.

It is a good point, what is Zaborski’s conclusion? Or does he just list the forms? The reason Kaufman saw them as separate innovations was because he felt the form survived way too long in Ge’ez to truly reflect an ancient Hamito-Semitic development. If you remember he considers roughly 1000 years to be the shelf-life of a verbal form, notwithstanding other linguistic forces. If Ge’ez was an earlier language, then the fact that the form survived on the two peripheral ends of Semitic would be good evidence that it developed at an older stage of the language. In contrast, the wide distribution of the *yaqtulu form suggests that it is the more original form. Of course who knows about some of this proto stuff.

He didn’t explain the forces that caused the innovation in the respective languages, I think he was just generally in a grammaticalization mood.

As for -tan-, this may have been one of the places where he saw a Sumerian influence on the Akkadian system. That is, Sumerian uses a wide array of affixes to specify all the grammatical information, the relationships between participants, and parameters such as location, direction, etc.

By: Jay

Jay — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 02:42:52 +0000

Great post, Pete. More importantly, good questions. I think if linguistics is to become more beneficial to students of Hebrew / Semitics, we need more people like yourself writing “intros” and then applying those intros to questions about the Semitic languages.

By: Carl Pace

Carl Pace — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 02:15:03 +0000

What I have found troubling in this discussion, Peter, is the origin of both the present-future in Akkadian and Ge’ez (as you have discussed) and the infixed -tan- stems of Akkadian (which you did not mention). I certainly find the idea of a grammaticalization of the D stem form with its lexical multiplicity to a durative present form, which Kaufman argues, appealing. What remains unexplained for me is why we seem to see these present-future forms with doubling of middle radicals in the Afro-Asiatic sphere, e.g., Tuareg /ilu:kku/ ‘he detests’ vs. /ilka/ ‘he detested’ or Kabyle /yesekkef/ ‘he drinks’ (Andrzej Zaborski discusses this and provides these and other examples in his article “Tense, Aspect and Mood Categories of Proto-Semitic,” in Current Issues in the Analysis of Semtic Grammar and Lexicon I [ed. L. Edzard, J. Retso; Wiesbaden: Harrasowitz, 2005], esp. 15-18). Should we seek the grammaticalization of the multipicative to a durative in an earlier phase of linguistic development? Can you remind me of what Kaufman said about how Akkadian and Ge’ez happened upon their identical but separate innovations, i. e., what motivated the transformation in each case?
Even though the durative/present-future and the perfect in Akkadian seem to be adequately explained by Kaufman, what is one to make of the -tan- forms, and their absence in the other Semitic languages? Any thoughts?