The Markers of Person, Gender, And Number in the Prefixes of G-Preformative Conjugations in Semitic‪.‬

As is well known, the preformative conjugations in the individual Semitic languages all operate according to the same basic principles in marking person, gender, and number. Person is usually indicated by a prefix that is attached to the verbal base, while gender and number are marked by the presence or absence of a suffix. The Classical Arabic verbal form yaktub "he shall write," for example, can be analyzed as [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII], where ya- marks the 3rd person masculine and [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] the singular. In Arabic ya-ktub-u "they shall write" the same prefix ya- is used for indicating the third person, and final -u marks the (masculine) plural. In certain forms in which the plural prefix has a different form than the singular, as in the 1st persons, no special suffix is required to mark plurality; compare [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] "I shall write" with [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] "we shall write." Similarly, masculine and feminine only have to be distinguished by suffixes when the prefixes are ambiguous, as [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] "you (ms) shall write" versus taktub-i "you (fs) shall write." In this case the final -i in the feminine form explicitly distinguishes the 2fs from the 2ms, as opposed to the 3rd person singular forms [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] (ms) and [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] (fs), in which the use of two different prefixes, ya- and ta-, is sufficient to distinguish masculine and feminine. Verbal prefixes usually consist of a consonant and a vowel. (1) While the consonant indicates the person and is consistent through all paradigms, the prefix vowel is dependent on verbal stem and voice. (2) The Proto-Semitic form of the prefix vowels is still a matter of dispute. In this article I will suggest a new reconstruction for these vowels in the G active stem based on their derivation from the respective independent pronouns.