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The Loss of the person-marker t- In Jibbali and Socotri

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 February 2009

David Testen
David Testen
Affiliation:
University of Chicago
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Extract

Johnstone (1968, 1975, 1980, 1981) has pointed out that two of the Modern South Arabian group of Semitic languages, Jibbali (Śḥeri) and Socotri, systematically lose the person-marking prefix t- (whether it mark the second person or the feminine third person) in certain types of verbs. An example of this phenomenon from Jibbali may be seen in the passive paradigm of the basic stem, which is given below alongside the active-voice paradigm of a ‘stative’- type basic verb, the conjugation of which (aside from the person-markers under discussion) closely matches that of the passive form. In the active voice, the tappears in the positions in which we expect it on the basis of the cognate prefixes in the other Semitic languages, while in the passive voice the t- is absent.

Type
Articles
Information
Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies , Volume 55 , Issue 3 , October 1992 , pp. 445 - 450
Copyright
Copyright © School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London 1992

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References

REFERENCES

Johnstone, T. M. 1968. The non-occurrence of a t-prefix in certain Socotri verbal forms’, BSOAS, XXI, 3, 1968, 515–25.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Johnstone, T. M. 1975. ‘The modern South Arabian languages’, Afroasiatic Linguistics, 1/5: 93–121.Google Scholar
Johnstone, T. M. 1980. ‘The non-occurrence of a t-prefix in certain Jibbāli verbal forms’, BSOAS, XLIII, 3: 466–70.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Johnstone, T. M. 1981. Jibbali lexicon. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar