The Unfolding of Language by Guy Deutscher

Author:Guy Deutscher
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.

The behaviour of the hollow verbs in the future tense can be called a-mutation: the vowel of the ancient stem (i or u) changes to a. This behaviour is quite similar to that of English pairs like sit-sat, spit-spat, or drink-drank, only that in English it is of course in the past tense that the vowel changes to a.

At first sight, the hollow verbs may seem like just another eccentricity in the elegant architecture of the Semitic verb. Instead of conforming to the proper template for the future tense, the only thing they deign to do is change their single vowel to a. But these irregularities should not be dismissed too lightly, since there are once again good reasons to believe that the a-mutation is an extremely old pattern, a relic from the first steps that the ancestor of the Semitic languages was taking in developing the root-and-template system.

There are various clues within the Semitic languages themselves which suggest the extreme antiquity of the a-mutation, but perhaps the most compelling evidence comes from languages further afield. The Semitic languages are distantly related to some language families in Africa, including the Berber languages of Morocco and the Cushitic languages of Ethiopia and Somalia. Semitic, Berber and Cushitic are members of what scholars nowadays call the Afro-Asiatic language family. No one can say for sure when the Semitic branch of Afro-Asiatic started diverging from the Cushitic branch, but based on the linguistic distance between the languages, linguists believe that it must have been at the very least 8,000 years ago. While none of the other Afro-Asiatic languages has a root-and-template system like that of Semitic, many of them do show a suspiciously familiar vowel mutation between the tenses. In the Cushitic language Somali, for example, one comes across forms like these:

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