Proto-Berbero-Semitic Primae Waw Verbs

So after our Summerschool course Benjamin Suchard and I were excited to finally get working on a paper together, something we've always wanted to do but somehow the stars never aligned. We had a cool idea about a parallel between the Proto-Semitic and Proto-Berber morphological behavior of roots that probably had an initial *w radical.

Turns out Prasse's Law of Berber Historical Linguistics reared its head ones again. Prasse's Law goes as follows:

Whenever you find a new insight into Proto-Berber historical linguistics, Karl-G. Prasse already saw it but wrote it in such an oblique way that you only understand what he meant after you've reinvented the wheel.

So since someone else saw it, on its own there's not much to publish I think, so let me write up the basic idea here. I might write about some more confounding features of Proto-Berber Primae Waw stem morphology in a next post.

Proto-Berber has a series of biradical verbs which in their underived form have an initial geminate, e.g. *ăffəɣ 'to go out', *ăqqəd 'to burn', *əddu 'to go'. In derived forms, most notably the causative these forms degeminate their geminate and a vowel u appears before it: *əssufəɣ, *əssuɣəd, *əssudu. This looks like whatever caused the geminate in the underived forms is something u-like. So people have imagined that we're looking at some kind of assimilation of *wc > c̄. There is also at least one pretty compelling Berber-Semitic parallel that might suport that *aqqəd 'to burn' sure looks like Sem. *w-ḳ-d 'to burn' (e.g. Ar. waqada).

However, we have a pretty good sense how both normal forms and causative forms are supposed to look and this runs into trouble, let's compare the causatives of this type to the regular triradical type:

	Underived		Causative
	Proto-Berber	Pre-Proto-Berber	Proto-Berber	Pre-Proto-Berber
Regular	ălməd	ălməd	əssəlməd	əssəlməd
Primae-Waw	ăqqəd	ăwɣəd	əssuɣəd	əssəwɣəd

The problem is that, if we assume that *wc yielded a geminate, then we would expect it to have yielded a geminate in the causative as well, but there it vocalises to u.

This is where Benjamin noted: Well in Semitic Primae Waw verbs behave quite weird too, sometimes the *w (notably in underived verbs!) disappears altogether. You can still see this quite nicely in Classical Arabic: walada impf. yalidu not **yawlidu, the causative however, does mainting the *w in the prefix conjugation. ʔawlada impf. yūlidu (ultimatly from *yusawlid-). Thus Benjamin's idea was: what if the geminate found in the underived form isn't due to assimlation at all, but just lengthening of the initial radical of an original biradical -CvC- stem. that would resolve our problem!

	Underived		Causative
		Berb-Sem		Berb-Sem
Semitic	aḳid	< *aḳid	usawḳid	< *usv̆wḳid
Berber	ăqqəd		əssuɣəd

And it's pretty attractive too. You could understand the gemination in Proto-Berber either as simply being there for the verb to fill up the triradical shape needed for the light verb.

But there is in fact some very similar geminative behaviour in heavy verbs (verbs with three vowels), there too we see that the consonant that comes after the Person-Number-Gender prefixes are geminated, which yields alternations between the aorist and imperfect (e.g. əddukəl 'to walk together' impf. ətt-ədukul).

The comparison is note quite perfect because the imperfect of the primae waw verbs does not degeminate the stem geminate (ăkkəs impf. ətt-ăkkăs not *ətt-ăkăs), but that's something that could quite easily be explained with some analogy I think.

Anyway, this explanation reveals a highly specific and unusual morphophonological behaviour of Primae-waw verbs that is shared between Semitic and Berber, a nice point in favour of Proto-Berbero-Semitic I think. But as I said, we got Prasse'd, he said it already in 1973, albeit much more succinctly and much more briefly:

La semivoyelle tombe, mais la 2" subit un gémination compensative. Nous preférons nouns exprimer ainsi, au lieu de dire qu'il y a assimilation des 1" et 2" parce que d'une part le sémitique et l'égyptien connaisent aussi la perte d'une semivoyelle initiale, mais sans gémination compensative, et que d'autre par le berbère lui-même ne connaît pas ailleur des assimilations de cette espèce (p. ex. au milieu des quadrilitères).

Or to put it in English:

The semivowel (of the primae wāw verbs) drops, but the second radical undergoes compensatory gemination. We prefer to express ourselves as such, instead of saying that it is an assimilation of the first to the second radical on the one hand because Semitic and Egyptian also have the dropping of the initial semivowel, but without compensatory gemination, and on the other hand because Berber itself doesn't have any out assimilation of this kind (for example in the middle of quadriradical stems).

Our comment that the loss of the wāw in the underived stem but reappearance in the causative, just like in Semitic is not spelled out by Prasse specifically, although I have little doubt that such behaviour is what he had in mind. I'm curious about Prasse's comment about Egyptian. I'm aware there is some weirdness with the initial w- but it is no doubt conditioned differently on account of Egyptian not having a prefix conjugation, but I'd love to hear how it does function there, if anyone knows, drop a comment!