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Father, brother, and father-in-law as III-w nouns in Semitic

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 February 2016

Aren Wilson-Wright
Aren Wilson-Wright*
Affiliation:
University of Texas
*
wilsonwright@utexas.edu
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Abstract

In this paper, I argue that the Semitic kinship terms *ʔab-‘father’, *ʔaḫ- ‘brother’, and *ḥam- ‘father-in-law’ originally ended in a w, which left traces in several of their forms. In the singular, the w contracted with the case vowels leaving a distinctive pattern of short and long vowels in the unbound, bound, and suffixal forms. In the plural, the w was retained in several languages due to the insertion of an a-vowel between the final two root consonants, a common Afro-Asiatic pluralization strategy: *ʔabw- > *ʔabaw. I further suggest that the West Semitic plural morpheme -aw was derived by analogy with the plurals *ʔabaw and *ʔaḫaw, and is not, as commonly suggested, an inherited Semitic or Afro-Asiatic plural marker.

Keywords

Proto-SemiticKinship termsIII-w nounsBi-consonantal rootsBroken plurals
Type
Articles
Information
Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies , Volume 79 , Issue 1 , February 2016 , pp. 23 - 32
Copyright
Copyright © SOAS, University of London 2016 

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