Prefixes, Root Determinatives and the Problem of Biconsonantal Roots in Semitic
Summary
Zaborski asks when it is legitimate to trace Semitic triconsonantal verb roots back to older two-consonant roots. The established view, summarized in the Moscati–Spitaler–Ullendorf–von Soden Introduction, offers two routes: a meaningless extra consonant (a "root-determinative") attached to a biliteral core, and analogical expansion of "weak" verbs. Using structuralist morpheme analysis (Gleason, Bloomfield, Harris), he argues that the determinative theory is mostly unprovable. The leftover consonant carries no identifiable meaning or function. The claimed semantic likeness is subjective, and appeals to vague phonetic similarity invite circular reasoning. He contrasts this with prefixation by ʔ-, h-, s-, t-, m-, n-, which he treats as lexicalized affixes. He proposes strict conditions for reconstructing a biliteral root from such prefixed forms. He also reports a collection of nearly 300 biconsonantal roots attested in about 700 triliteral ones. The paper matters because it replaces impressionistic etymology with explicit acceptance criteria and a warning about chance resemblance.
Key points
- Classic example he doubts: Hebrew p-r-d, p-r-m, p-r-s, p-r-q, p-r-r and similar, all supposedly built on p-r "divide". He considers the shared meaning too loose to count as evidence.
- Acceptance rule: posit a biliteral root only if (a) at least two triliteral roots share the 2nd and 3rd radicals with the same or clearly related meaning, or (b) a prefixed root sits next to a semantically related weak verb. Example: Hebrew halak, Arabic ʔalaka and salaka.
- Proposed path for prefixed forms: biliteral verb → prefixed deverbal noun → secondary triliteral verb.
- Chance resemblance is likely because the root space is small. About 29 prehistoric consonants plus incompatibility constraints yield many minimal pairs, some of which will look related by accident.
- Earlier work falls short. Of Hurwitz's (1913) 172 etymologies, only about a third hold up, and Botterweck's gl/kl/ql study is largely rejected. The author's own corpus covers ~300 biliteral roots in ~700 triliteral ones, and he hopes computerized dictionaries (a Prague North-West Semitic project) will speed this work.
Interesting ideas
- I1. A segment counts as a morpheme only if the remainder also recurs with meaning or fills a known slot (the cranberry vs. bug/bee/beetle contrast); this stops over-segmentation. — For Mova (tokens): Before splitting an unknown English word into stem and affix, require that both the residue and the affix recur in that position across the lexicon.
- I2. Two hypotheses cannot support each other when both are unproven, as when a shared root is inferred from a similarity that itself needs the shared root. — For Mova (learn): When building silver data, never let a witness parser's output be validated by a signal derived from the same assumption; keep evidence sources independent.
- I3. Before claiming a pattern, estimate how often it would arise by chance in a small combinatorial space. — For Mova (learn): Add negative controls that compute the coincidental rate of a proposed lexical or derivational link (e.g., random word pairs differing by one letter) before accepting it.
- I4. No alternation may be posited without a stated phonemic or morphological condition; ad hoc rules made up per case are rejected. — For Mova (learn): Self-induced repair rules should be admitted only with an explicit conditioning context that holds across many examples, not as one-off patches.
- I5. Affixes with a known position and a once-grammatical role are trusted over vague "extensions", even after they have lexicalized. — For Mova (world): In WordNet-based derivational links (re-, un-, -er), prefer links via affixes with documented function and flag opaque lexicalized ones, rather than linking words by surface overlap.
Cite
@inproceedings{zaborski2026prefixes,
title = {{Prefixes, Root Determinatives and the Problem of Biconsonantal Roots in Semitic}},
author = {Zaborski, Andrzej},
booktitle = {Folia Orientalia 11},
year = {2026},
url = {https://wydawnictwo.pan.pl/index.php/fo/article/view/2420}
}References
- terweck, Der Triliterismus im Semitischen, Bonn 1952, and the review by J. Heller, Neuere Literatur zur Biliterismus-Frage, Ar. Or., 27, 1959, p. 678-82. find
- S. Moscati, A. Spitaler, E. Ullendorf, W. von Soden, An Introduction to the Comparative Grammar of the Semitic Languages, Wiesbaden 1964, p. 75. mazaqa ,,to tear"; waha('i,) and wahana ,,to be weak", sa(taqa and sahana to crush, to tear to pieces, to pound" etc. etc. that clearly sh~w se~antic affinity or even identity of meaning (in the present stage!) of some verbs differing only in one consonan~ 4 • It ~ust be however underlined, that if there is no clear relation or iden-tit~ of the ~earring of such roots, the reco~struction of an_ original biconsonan:tal root is not very probable smce we may fmd our· selves committing the error of vicious circle. Then our reasoning may run like this: we acknowledge the existence of a biconso~~ntal root because of the assumed semantic relation of two triliteral verbs but this semantic relation is also hypothetical and to be proved. There is even much more danger whe~ some linguists ~ry to reconstruct the biconsonantal roots comparmg two verbs with similar" meaning and with phonetically ,,similar" two or even :11 three consonants i.e. when they assume the radicals may have undergone certain (what exactly and in what positions~) phonetic changes. The mi.proved and unclear ,,similarity" o~ meanin_g permits them· to by-pass the discordance wit~ phonet1~ ( even if not exceptionless) laws in order to postulate m every smgle case a subjective ,,phonetic similarity" or ad hoe invented phonetic laws and this in turn permits them to forget the intricate problem of how to prove the genetic affinity of the meaning. The criterion of ,,phonetic similarity", i.e. the proximity of t~e pl~ces of ~rticulation, the similar or the same manner of articulat10n, and the impressionistic acoustic ,,resemblance" . has been d·e~ valuated too many times. The fact that no semantic value, i.e. no lexical nor grammatical meaning can be attached to the remaining co~so~ant (which accordingiy with many followers of the root-determmat1ves 4 ,,Reimwortbildung" may be considered as a :-;~urce of. origin ?f some of these roots. Of. C. Brockelmann, Semitisch_e Reirr:w_ortbil-dungen, ZS, B, 1927, p. 6-38. Arabio-Frenoh-?English Di?tionary by R. Blach.ere, M. 0houemi and 0. find
- Demzeau, Pans 1964 quotes such roots and gives c~oss-references., _Of. also M. _0oh,e~. Essai Compciratif sur le vooabulaire et la phonetique du ohami-to-semitique, Paris 1947, p. 59, 60, 66-67. Some authors ~u~gested also that prepositions could. be ,,incorporated" but no convmcmg examples could be found. theory may be the first, the second or the third radical) poses even more difficulties. .As long as we can attribute no meaning to the remaining radical we cannot consider the other two consonants as a morpheme. It may be useful to quote an example from the basic handbook by H . .A. Gleason who proposes to compare bug, bee, beetle and butter-fly. ,,It seems ridiculous, Gleason says, to suggest that since these all include /bf and all mean some kind of insect, /bf must be a morpheme. But this is only because, as native speakers, we know that /eg/, /eiy/, /iytil/, and /eterjlay / do not exist as morphemes that can be associated with these words" 5 • This is obviously a different case as with cranberry in which no meaning can be attributed to /cran/ since it does not recur in other cases but we still have to consider it as a morpheme because berry is one (e.g. blueberry, strawberry etc.) and /cran/ occurs in the same position as blue, straw etc. Moreover cranberry is a special kind of fruit 6 • In the case of the hypothetical root-determinatives in Semitic the meaning of the both segments is not established their morphological function being unknown. Hence the possibility of reconstructing the original biconsonantal roots i8 put into question. From the phonological or better. say phonemic point of view the acoustic ,,similarity" depends on the phonemic system of the language of which a person postulating such a relation is a speaker: for a German speaking person for example, /sf, /~/ and ft/ may sound ,,similar" but they are absolutely different since they constitute three phonemes e.g. in .Arabic. In some Semitic dialects the opposition emphatic versus non-emphatic ceased to exist but obviously it does not justify a neglect of this opposition when it • still works. .As long as there is no possibility of discovering a condition (phonemic of morphological) for a possible differentiation of a hypothetical biconsonantal roots and for root-determinatives, we can postulate no alternations and make no reconstructions. The fact that, for example, liquids or nasals may in-5 H . .A. Gleason, An Introduction to Descriptive Linguistics, New York 1965, p. 56. 6 ; . L. Bloomfield, Language, New York 1933, p. 156; Z. S. Harris, Methods in Structural Linguistics, Chicago 1951, p. 177, and. cf. N. Cb,omsky, Syntactic Structures, The Hague 1957, p. 100. terchange in some languages under given conditions and of course ill a given stage, is not enough to take the existence of ,,nasal, liquid etc. affixes" for granted. The vivisection of a root into a hypothetical morpheme and f1 phoneme is at least very dubious. In general it can be said that the theory of root-determinative: is very controversial. For Indo-European 7 let us quote .A. lVIeillet's opinion about root-determinatives: ,,Oes elargissements sont une cause d'imprecision en matiere d'etymologie, car il est egalement impossible soit de les negliger soit d'en faire une theorie complete" 8 • Finally let us draw attention to the fact the Semitic root (or rather its consonantal ,,skeleton") is rather a ,,short" morpheme, i.e. the number of all possible combinations of three consonantal phonemes (with the total of 29 consonants proposed for the prehistorical stage of Semitic) is limited and not very large at all since there are well known phonotactic principles of ,,incompatibility" of ... a number of consonantal phonemes in well defined positions 9 , Hence a big number of minimal pairs, i.e. of morphemes differing formally only in one phoneme, is possible . .Among such pairs and groups of pairs there may be accidentally verbs with .. ,,similar" or even identical meaning but not related genetically. This may serve as another warning against hasty reconstructions. The problem of root-determinatives must be treated separately with the seemingly s_imilar problem of the original bicons.onantal roots extended by prefixation. If there are at least two triconsonantal roots having the same or connected meaning and the same two radicals the first radical being • -, h, s-, t-, m-, n-, then we may posit the reconstruction of a biconsonantal root with a considerable probability. Such examples as Hebrew halak ,,to go", .Arabic 'alaka ,,to send" and salaka ,,to go, to travel along the This does not mean, of course, that I postulate Indo-Europea.11 • and Semitic relationship. 8 .A. Meillet, Introduction a l'etude comparative des langiws Indo-europeennes, Paris 1953, p. 179. Of. also p. 177. 9 J. Macdonald, New Thoughts on a Biliteral Origin for the Semitio Verb, ,,The Annual of Leeds University Oriental Society", 15, 1963-65, p. 63~85; tries to explain the relevance of the principles of the pb,ono-logical patterning of the root morphemes for his study of root-determinatives but these do n,ot seem to.play any part on the morphonemic level. find
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