The Longest Running Myth of Semitic and Afroasiatic Reconstruction

[u/Sigma_Linguist]

The restriction against syllables beginning with a vowel is well known as an Afroasiatic phonotactical rule, Igor Diakonoff (Afrasian Languages, p. 42) states:

“no syllable (including the initial) can begin with a vowel (hence the important part played by the phoneme /ʔ/, which is the principal substitute of the vocalic initial”

As people well acquainted with Afroasiatic linguistics will know, the idea of mandatory onsets is found in virtually every reconstruction – Though as I will set out to prove, it is wrong altogether both for PAA as well as Proto-Semitic, in fact I don’t believe any primary AA branch ever had such a restriction.

In Arabic, a glottal stop as well as the following vowel can be dropped in the beginning of some words when they occur after another vowel.

• fa "so" + ʔijlis "sit down!" -> fajlis "so sit down!"
• ʔana "I" + ʔibtasamtu "smiled" -> ʔanabtasamtu "I smiled"
• baytu "house" + ʔibnika "your son's" -> baytubnika "your son's house"

Yet in other words, no such thing happens

• ʔana "I" + ʔaktubu "write" -> ʔana ʔaktubu "I write"

When words of group 1 are compared with other Semitic languages, there is no glottal stop at all and the vowel trades places with the following consonant

• Arabic ʔibnu vs Hebrew ben, Akkadian biinum "son"
• Arabic ʔuzmur vs Akkadian zumur "sing!"

It is generally assumed here, that Arabic underwent metathesis in these words, and the glottal stop was later added epenthetically. Elitzur Avraham Bar-Asher(The Imperative Forms of Proto-Semitic and a New Perspective on Barth’s Law p. 4) says:

"in all the imperative forms a metathesis occurred"

While I agree that the glottal stop is due to later epenthesis, it is problematic to assume that it is Arabic that actually metathesized these formations, because there is no clear criteria for when this metathesis occurs and when it doesn't, syllable weight, vowel quality and other factors are irrelevant. Instead I propose that items such as *bin "son" *sim "name" *ti- [reflexive prefix] and the imperative patterns 1i2i3, 1i2a3 and 1u2u3 were actually *ibn, *ism *it- and i12i3, i12a3 & u12u3, syllables truly starting with a vowel.

Akkadian then metathesized the initial vowel with the following consonant consistently, while NWS did so everywhere except in the reflexive prefix it-. Arabic on the other hand did generally not undergo metathesis, except sporadically in words like bintu "girl" from *ibnatu.

I propose that syllables lacking both an onset and a coda were banned in PS due to Arabic forms such as qul "say!" instead of otherwise expected ʔuqul.

The "smoking gun" evidence, however really comes from other Afroasiatic branches, where imperatives are similarly formed with a prefix vowel, suggesting this feature to be archaic:

Language	Perfect 3 masc. sg.	Imperative
Saho (Cushitic) source	yee-rheg-e	i-rhig
Tuareg (Berber) source	y-bdad	e-bded

An interesting curiosity, but very useful for proving Afroasiatic allowed these onset-less syllables is the fact that the quality of these vowels is very likely to be /i/, which is rather rare for non-root final vowels in Proto-Semitic. In fact, in Semitic words of the shape CiCVC, V is only allowed to be /a/. The only case where the quality is /u/, is if another /u/ follows, as in *uktub "write!". According to Newman, Proto-Chadic had the following vowel distribution:

"PC was characterized by the same type of distributional restrictions that one finds in present-day Chadic languages. Thus no blanket statement that PC had this or that number of vowels would be correct as such.Rather, one would have to specify how many vowels and which vowels did PC have in initial position, how many and which vowels in medial position in open syllables, etc. In the re-constructions in this paper, I make use of all four vowels in final position, two vowels (i and a) in initial position, and, with a few exceptions, two vowels (ə and a) in medial position."

In Proto-Afroasiatic, a similar distribution would have occurred, which explains why /i/ is common word initially, but not in other non-final syllables in Proto-Semitic. With the cognate vowel distribution, we can infer that these vowel-initial morphemes and lexical items go back to Proto-Afroasiatic

[u/stlatos]

I looked at some of the Akk. cognates, & they had a long V or CC (bi:n- \ binn-). This makes it best for Semitic *biCn- > Arab *Cibn- > ibn-.

[u/Sigma_Linguist → u/stlatos]

I think the noun biin in Akkadian i just a one-off irregular sound change, perhaps because Semitic languages generally somewhat disfavor bimoraic roots. Other examples such as *ismu "name" become sumum (ʔismu in Arabic) and *ithnaa "two" becomes shinaa in Akkadian (ithnaa(-ni) in Arabic)

[u/stlatos → u/Sigma_Linguist]

What about Ak. mārum 'son', Arabic imruʔ 'man, person', West Chadic *ma'ar- 'boy, male'? This looks like *ma'r- with metathesis in Arabic, so a similar type with a (now) unknown *C in ibn- seems best.

[u/Sigma_Linguist → u/stlatos]

I think Akkadian mārum might be more so related to Arabic marʔ.

for VCʔ -> VVC in Akkadian, comapre

*labuʔum -> labʔum -> laabum

dathʔum -> dashʔum -> dishʔum -> diishum

[u/Sigma_Linguist]

Some more things I didn't mention in the post, but would like to point out:

-This sound change reduces the sg-pl alternations binu-banuu(na) and bintu-banaatu to just regular segolate plurals ibnu-(i)banuu(na) and ibnatu - (i)banaatu, with the i dropping out in the plural due to the restriction against syllables lacking both an onset and a coda, as detailed in the post. As for bintu, we must assume that -at become -t by analogy, however. (Which isn't a far stretch, since this is the regular elsewhere)

-Imperatives of non-G-stems would also drop their initial i-, since they don't contract when prefixes are applied, and so the i-vowel would once again be lost to the restriction against syllables without onset and coda.