Medio-Passives of the Primae Waw verbs

A final conundrum among a whole slew of conundrums among these among the primae waw verbs is the behaviour of the mediopassive derivation.

In general, I don't think we are quite ready to reconstruct the Proto-Berber at all yet, a bunch of Berber languages show vastly different formations, which do not seem obviously reconcilable, but even sticking to the Tuareg forms, the mediopassive of the primae waw verbs behaves really weird.

First the normal verb, here we see that the mediopassive is created through an m prefix and added the |Ə-A-->| vowel pattern to the aorist stem. Thus we get: ikrəs (< *yăkres) 'to tie', and yămmăkrăs (< *yəmmăkrăs) 'to be tied together'. So if the primae waw verbs like *ăkkəs 'to remove' should behave like 'normal' triradical verbs, one would expect either something like *yəmăkkăs or if in this stem a *u should appear (maybe from *ăw?) one might predict something liek yəmukăs.  Since the presence of *u seems to triger a all-Ə vocalism in the stem, one would probably expect *yəmukəs.

Instead, we basically get a combination of the two. Indeed an u appears, and this turns the aorist voalism into all-Ə, but... the geminate doesn't disappear giving us Tuareg yəmmukkəs 'to be removed'. I don't know what to make of that.

*vcc verbs act as expected. yakər 'to steal' has a mediopassive yămmakăr (< *yəmmakăr), keeping the low-vowel aorist, and simply using the long vowel as a regular long vowel slot.

So with the *wcc roots, you end up with both u and gemination being in a kind of quantum superposition, one time one comes out, and the other time the other, and we don't fully understand the conditioning, but then the mediopassive comes along and both come out!

Comments

[David Marjanović]

Thousands of years of analogical reshaping?

Actually, a few hundred would suffice.