IE Plosive System: DLW Explains It All For You

Nicholas Widdows nicholas.widdows at traceplc.co.uk
Fri Mar 19 11:49:33 UTC 1999


[ note to moderator snipped ]

DLW wrote:
> Before going on to the next part of my brilliant "tour de force",
> I need someone to answer for me a very basic question: does Semitic permit
> consecutive pharngealized ("emphatic") consonants in its roots?

Someone who looked at this less than ten years ago and/or who has
dictionaries to hand, or who just knows more than I do, is probably better
equipped to answer this, but I like seeing my name in print, so here goes.
My recollection is that the main restriction is that consecutive velars
didn't co-occur, and that emphatics (but not q) counted as velar(ized).

So you don't get *ks~C or *Ct~g or t~s~C or the like as Hebrew roots. In
Arabic it's slightly disguised: [j^] comes from earlier [g], so you don't
get *kj^ or *j^t~ or *kz~. But [q] collocates freely, as in [qas~r]
'castle', [qit~3ah] 'piece'. Another complication is that [x] and [G] don't
count as velar, presumably because they derived from something more guttural
in the restriction period. So you do get [s~aGi:r] 'small', [xit~a:b]
'letter', [?axd~ar] 'green'.

The archaeo-velars [k j^ s~ z~ t~ d~] happily co-occur with other gutturals:
[2is~a:n] 'horse', [2uj^rah] 'room', [t~a:?ir] 'bird', [qat~a3a] 'he cut'. I
can't remember whether the restriction is across the whole root or just
neighbouring consonants, but I can't think of any words like *[t~alas~a] or
*[j^abaka].

Nicholas Widdows
(using [2] and [3] for the pharyngals)



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