Segolate Plurals and North-West Semitic

Yesterday, I wrote a little thread on the productive segolate plurals in Arabic, and how this challenges some of the notions of this as a North-West-Semitic isogloss. I received some pushback, several people felt I misrepresented Huehnergard's position.

I still don't feel I quite did that. Huehnergard clearly not only sees the spread of the *malk pl. *malakīm as against broken plural options as the innovation (which is defensible, and more clearly formulated here), but also as the regularization of a-insertion in sound plurals (the only way to make sense of the cited examples of laʕnah pl. laʕanāt versus ʔahl pl. ʔahlūn).

The latter point I really think we ought to throw out completely. ʔahl pl. ʔahlūn indeed lacks the expected a-insertion, but also in Arabic this is the exception and not the rule. I honestly only know this word to have this plural (and ʔahālī- is the much more typical plural, but ʔahl-ū- is the Quranic form!). If the innovation is that this was generalized, we are talking about an innovation in a single noun *ʔahl- where this happened. That's not significant.

But I think the whole discussion, by focusing on these segolate plurals is in fact a red herring. Arabic's plural system cannot be simply compared to the North-West Semitic plural system, and by assuming that they get equated important details are lost. I think if we take a more subtle approach, we can actually come to see a much more pervasive innovation in North-West Semitic, but it has nothing to do with segolate plurals.

The plural system of Arabic, maximally has three semantically distinct "plurals". This is best represented with the noun baqarah 'cow'. This noun has 1. a paucal plural 2. a collect and 3. a normal plural: sg. baqar-at pauc. baqar-āt coll. baqar pl. ʔabqār.

Not all nouns have collectives, and especially post-Quranic Classical Arabic the paucal versus plural distinction is not always so well-kept. But it is prescribed by the Arab grammarians, and the Quran and pre-Islamic poetry quite clearly has the distinction (paucal being 3-9 things; plural being more than that). Clear traces of this system actually continue in Modern Arabic dialects.

North-West Semitic has a much simpler system, essentially just singular and plural. There are traces of collectives, but they have basically been integrated into the plural system. So now the question becomes: is the Arabic paucal/plural distinction an expansion of the system we see in North-West-Semitic, or is NWS a simplification of the Arabic system? My inclination is to think of the Arabic as original, but people do not talk about this enough, if you want to argue for some special significance of the segolate plurals, it's nothing to do with those plurals specifically, it has to do with the loss of the true plurals in favour of paucal plurals!

For feminine segolate nouns in Arabic, the formation of paucal plurals besides true plurals is regular. So laʕnah/niʕmah/ẓulmah and ANY other CVCC-at- noun always and regularly have the segolate plural, i.e. laʕanāt, niʕa/imāt, ẓula/umāt. However, these plurals are always paucal. Besides this such nouns also have true plurals, which are typically broken plurals liʕān, niʕam, ẓulam. NWS lacks broken plurals of this type completely.

However, these kinds of broken plurals have clear parallels in other Semitic languages (notably Ethio-Semitic) as well as in Afro-Asiatic languages, which certainly suggests that they are archaic (this is definitely convincing for liʕān type plurals, but one actually has to wonder whether niʕam and ẓulam aren't just clipped versions of the paucal plural with the -āt removed).

So for CVCC-at- nouns in NWS, if there is an innovation at all, it is the spread of the paucal plural to come to function as the only plural, and thus the loss of the broken plurals. There is nothing special about the CVCC-at- plurals here in Arabic (or NWS) for that matter. This is the generalizable rule for feminine nouns in general: What becomes the regular plural in NWS is simply the regular paucal of Arabic, whereas what is the true plural of Arabic disappears without a trace in NWS.

This basically resolves the feminine side of the picture. The masculine (or maybe more precise: the nouns that lack the -at- ending) is more complex. Where CVCC-at- pauc. CVCaC-āt- is regular, and perfectly parallel between Arabic and NWS (with the caveat that in Arabic it is paucal and in NWS it is plural), it is more difficult with CVCC nouns. Here, finding compelling parallels to the NWS *malk pl.*malakīm system is significantly harder. There are a couple of standard examples that get cited, e.g. ʔarḍ pauc. ʔarad-ūn 'earth', ʔahl pauc. ʔahal-āt "family". But this kind of plural is legitimately rare in Arabic. So are we wrong to say CVCaC-āt- plurals are NWS, but right that CVCaC-ū/ī- are a NWS innovation? Maybe, but this really needs to be qualified.

Masculine nouns, by definition cannot have collectives, but otherwise have the same system as the feminine, e.g. sg. kalb 'dog' pauc. ʔaklub (not **kalab-ūn) pl, kilāb. The notable difference here is therefore that the masculine nouns use a broken plural pattern (rather than a suffixed pattern) to makes the paucal (feminine nouns can actually do this too niʕmah pauc niʕa/imāt, ʔanʕum). Now, you might conclude that since broken plurals are archaic, clearly NWS is the innovator and Arabic the archaic one, but here I would urge to point out that not all broken plurals are created equal. While the true plural pattern kilāb has excellent Afro-Asiatic comparanda, and must certainly be old, ʔaklub is in fact extremely isolated, so isolated that it only occurs in Arabic (the Gəʕəz hägär pl. ʔähgur looks superficially similar, but would be equivalent to *ʔaCCūC). Should we really conclude here that Arabic is the only one to retain this system of paucal broken plurals? OR alternatively, should we take seriously the possibility that Arabic is in fact innovative here. I think the latter. While there are a number of broken plural patterns that convincingly be reconstructed for Proto-Semitic and even earlier, I don't think any of the ʔa- prefixed ones (which are strictly all paucal plurals according to the Arab grammarians) are necessarily that, and seem to rather be a typical areal innovation shared between Arabic, Ethio-Semitic, Ancient South Arabian and perhaps Modern South Arabian. If the ʔa- plurals are an innovative paucalisation system we can Imagine a Proto-Semitic system as follows:

	Masculine	Feminine
Singular	*kalb-	*kalb-at-
Paucal	*kalab-ū	*kalab-āt-
Plural	*kilāb-	*kilāb-

Not the gender neutralization of *kalb-/*kalb-at- in the plural. The innovation of NWS would then be the generalization of the paucal plural for all plurals (which has as an added bonus that it annuls the gender neutralization).

	Masculine	Feminine
Singular	*kalb-	*kalb-at-
Paucal	*kalab-ū	*kalab-āt-
Plural	*kilāb- > *kalab-ū	*kilāb- > *kalab-āt-

The Arabic (and perhaps a more general "South Semitic" areal development) would be the introduction of a new paucal plural pattern, which completely ousted the original paucal in the masculine, and occasionally competes with the original feminine paucal.

	Masculine	Feminine
Singular	*kalb-	*kalb-at-
Paucal	*kalab-ū > ʔaklub-	*kalab-āt- (*ʔaklub-)
Plural	*kilāb-	*kilāb-

This is just one way of explaining it, but I think it should be clear that "the *malk pl. *malakīm plural was generalized in NWS" clearly does not capture what has actually happened and reconfigured, and it gives the mistaken impression that kalbah pl. kalabāt style plurals are not actually the regular paucal pluralisation strategy of Arabic.

One may want to argue that the ʔa- prefixed broken plural patterns are in fact archaic, and they form the old productive paucalisation strategy in Semitic. If this is true, I think that can only be reasonably be argued for the masculine paucal. I see no way to account for the regular use of the -āt- feminine paucals in Arabic if this is not an archaism. This would make for an unusually asymmetric system, which is not necessarily an argument against it, but not exactly in favour of it either.