Dominique Bobeck

And then there’s over-the-top Venda citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/document?rep...

I suppose you have modern Aramaic on your list? Such as Turoyo -no/-at (1SG/2SG) and more: ko-domaxno 'I'm sleeping', dəmxat 'you're sleeping'. Cf. Tur. ono 'I', hat 'you', cf. Syriac eno and att.

It's not that far. But I'd be surprised to see large effects, especially in the direction Canaanite > Akkadian. We also have to consider Amorite ...

True, but historically impossible. The word raḫāṣum is attested already in the Old Babylonian period, i.e. *before* it came into contact with Canaanite (which by the way borrowed more from Akkadian than vice versa). Source: Akkadisches Handwörterbuch, vol. 2.

*rḥṣ̌ is actually a veeery old root in Semitic, cf. Akkadian raḫāṣu(m) 'to flood, wash'.

In al-Awabi Arabic (Oman), the prefix vowel of imperfect verbs is generally determined by the place of articulation of the first root consonant:

yi- if C1 is coronal or emphatic [!]

yiḍḥuk, yiḍrub, yiṣbaġ, yiṭlub

A friend of mine, which originally introduced herself as Anna, uses her actual name now, too

Universitat de Barcelona? Felt like King's Landing

Furthermore, I'd be glad to have another word for the Semitic language family. People sometimes get confused when I tell them I'm a Semiticist and work on Hebrew, Arabic, and other related languages. 😅

Talay, Shabo (2014), “The Mesopotamian-Levantine Dialect Continuum”. In: T. Davidovich, A. Lahdo and T. Lindquist (eds.): From Tur Abdin to Hadramawt. Semitic Studies Festschrift in Honour of Bo Isaksson on the occasion of his retirement. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag 2014. S. 179 – 188.

"Nicht mehr internationale Spitze"

Jedes Jahr wird weltweit überprüft, wie frei Wissenschaftler arbeiten können. Jetzt ist Deutschland beim "Academic Freedom Index" aus der Spitzengruppe gefallen. Was steckt dahinter? Ein Interview.

Im Tagesspiegel & im #WiardaBlog: www.jmwiarda.de/2025/03/13/n...

It was a pleasure to listen to your talk in Barcelona!

It has been a great DGfS conference last week in Mainz! I hope I could show that Syriac can contribute to our understanding of cyclic phonology.
#DGfS47
#DGfS2025

the real outlier is #Romanian, which, I think, doesn't have a single example of such prothetic vowels in inherited #Latin words. which points either to early diatopic variation in this regard or to different word-initial phonotactic tendencies.

More than 40 downloads in just 2 days! So far and by far, the most downloaded paper of the volume. A big thank you to all who've read (or are reading) the paper!
revistes.uab.cat/catjl/articl...
#linguistics
#academicsky

A picture from today just a few minutes ago.
📍Berlin

(1) How did Syriac end up with different 1s, 2ms perfect forms ket̠bet̠ vs. kt̠ab̠t, if the ancestors are katabt-u, katabt-a?
(2) Why does 3fs show /e/ if the ancestor is katab-at?
(3) Does 2fs show deletion of a *long* -ī (*katab-tī)? 1pl can be kt̠ab̠n, where's the -ā of *-nā?

You can see that word-final vowel shortening and vowel elision stand in a "feeding" relationship.

Good question! In Biblical Aramaic, it's precisely what you'd expect: kiþvaþ! In Syriac, reanalysis desoftens the 3rd radical. In a synchronic picture, the -et/-aþ morpheme must be extended by the floating feature [-continuant].

1. Wordfinal vowel shortening and spirantisation: /ka.ta.bū/ -> [ka.þa.vu]
2. Stress: moraic trochee L<-R: /ka.þa.vu/ -> [ka.('þa.vu)
3. Vowel elision: /ka.('þa.vu)/ -> [k.('þav)]

*ka.'ta.bu is what I'd do, yes. CVC & CVV equally attract stress. The emphaticus ending -ā is trimoraic in this approach.

That's the missing piece in the puzzle! 😃

It has some similarities to the talk at the DOT 2022 in Berlin. But now, I can see the full picture 😅. By the way, this thread was a great opportunity for me, to prepare myself for Thursday 🙏🏽

Maybe even ['ekal] 'he ate' <- /'kal/ <- /'akal/. (Sorry for don't typing begadkefat.)

There is also no evidence for a rule of vowel raising (a -> e / ??). We *could* say that raising is part of the morpheme. But thus is very ad hoc. Instead the identity of epenthetic vowels in Syriac as [e] are well supported elsewhere. Historically -tu > -t > -et or 'eštā 'six' < *š(i)tā'. ...

I adopted the "cycles" of Stratal OT (cf. Lexical Phonology & Morphology):
Stem level,
Word level,
Phrase level.
The idea is: Both long vowels and coda consonants trigger syllable weight; place a moraic trochee from the right to left. This would falsely predict *katbat. ...

This is repaired by epenthesis: k<e>tbát. Same with ketbét. This is THE topic of my presentation in a few days at the DGfS meeting: sites.google.com/view/variati...

For ketbet & ketbat, -et & -at are attached at a 2nd cycle, namely AFTER vowel reduction: 1. /katab/ -> [ktab]; 2. /ktab+at/ -> ketbat. Here, epenthetic <e> comes in. The first & unstressed /a/ is syncopated, which would produce an ungrammatical consonant cluster (ktbát). ...

... since there is a split in morphological cycles. In ktab(w) (3PL.M), it's 1 cycle. Here Syriac is like Levantine Arabic Arabic: long word-final vowels become short. But only in Syriac, these now-short vowels are regularly deleted. They reappear if suffixed: katbūn(y) 'they wrote to me'. ...