Lecture | Lectures in Historical Linguistics and Philology
Afroasiatic middle t- and its protean history
- Date
- Friday 3 May 2024
- Time
- Series
- Lectures in Historical Linguistics and Philology
- Location
-
Lipsius
Cleveringaplaats 1
2311 BD Leiden - Room
- 2.27
Abstract
Semitic, Berber, Cushitic, and (whether by contact or by common inheritance) Omotic all offer robust evidence for an Afroasiatic voice prefix t- with meanings ranging from reflexive to passive. Alongside this, however, specific families or languages within Afroasiatic attest a strikingly wide variety of functions for a prefix t- beyond the domain of voice, even excluding the presumably unrelated domain of subject agreement. For aspect marking, mutually opposite uses are found in Akkadian (perfect) and in Berber (imperfective). In the formation of verbal nouns, Semitic shows a recurrent association of t-prefixed verbal nouns not only with t-prefixed verbs but also with middle-geminate ones, while Berber shows more sporadic cases of t-prefixation being used to form verbal nouns. In this talk I will examine aspects of the history of this t- morpheme and the pathways by which it developed this diverse range of uses, placing Berber within its wider Afroasiatic context.