Arabic "expanded" roots

Stefan Georg Georg at home.ivm.de
Wed Mar 1 19:39:31 UTC 2000


>At 09:46 AM 2/24/00 +0000, Larry Trask wrote:
>>is no way the borrowing language can inflect the borrowed verb-stem.  Arabic
>>loans into Turkish are a good case in point: there is no earthly way that an
>>internally inflected Arabic verbal root can be handled within the purely
>>suffixing Turkish verbal morphology, which requires verb-stems to contain
>>vowels.

>Umm, what will get borrowed into Turkish is one of the "expanded" variants
>*with* its vowels, which will then be treated as a Turkish verb stem, and
>inflected according to the Turkish rules.

I confess that I don't know what an "expanded" variant of an Arabic root
is. What I do know, however, is that *every* Arabic verb form has vowels.
The triconsonantal root is a (necessary) abstraction, since for the lion's
share of Arabic verbs it is the three consonants which seem to be the only
*invariant* part of the verbal lexeme. But three consonants are no verb,
the "root" thus is a theoretical artefact, something like dehydrated coffee
actually.

Arabic verbal "roots" show up in Turkish mostly in the garb of verbal nouns
(in a wide variety of formations), accompanied by verbs of "doing" (el-,
eyle-, kIl-) or "becoming" (edil-, olun-)  in order to be "inflected".

Dr. Stefan Georg
Heerstraße 7
D-53111 Bonn
FRG
Tel./Fax +49-228-691332



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