The feminine endings*-ayand*-āyin Semitic and Berber

Abstract

This paper examines the evidence for the marginal feminine endings *-ay- and *-āy- in Proto-Semitic, and the feminine endings *-e and *-a in Proto-Berber. Their similar formation (*CV̆CC-ay/āy), semantics (verbal abstracts, underived concrete feminine nouns) and plural morphology (replacement of the feminine suffix by a plural suffix with -w-) suggest that this feminine formation should be reconstructed to a shared ancestor which may be called Proto-Berbero-Semitic.

Folia Orientalia

“…Iznasen amənsi); the consonant w appears in the plural, however (e.g. Iznasen imənsiwən), and may have been lost in the singular, a development that is quite commonly found in Berber (see, among many others, van Putten 2018).…”

What can Nabataean Aramaic tell us about Pre‐Islamic Arabic?

“…Two Arabic feminine suffixes, which occur in Classical Arabic as ‐ ā ( ʾalif maqṣūrah , also ‐ ē in some reading traditions, as in ʾiḥd‐ā or ʾiḥd‐ē ‘one [f.]’) and ‐ āʾ ( ʾalif mamdūdah , as in bayḍ‐āʾ ‘white [f.]’), can be reconstructed for Proto‐Arabic as containing a final * y (Van Putten, 2018). In other words, Classical Arabic ‐ ā or ‐ ē and ‐ āʾ (in these suffixes) correspond to Proto‐Arabic * ‐ay‐ and * ‐āy‐ , respectively.…”

The Berbero-Semitic adjective

“…The expertise of the author mostly extends to these two branches, and the many morphological parallels appear to make it a fruitful avenue of research to focus on only these two branches of the Afro-Asiatic phylum. Two recent articles concerning Berbero-Semitic, one which discusses the verbal system (Kossmann & Suchard 2018) and the other the feminine endings *-ay and *-āy (Van Putten 2018a) further shows that there is a lot of room for reconstructing quite specific morphology between these two branches.…”