Re: [tied] All of creation in Six and Seven

On Sat, 15 Nov 2003 18:59:59 +0000, elmeras2000 <jer@...> wrote:

>Your fem. sab`ú: agrees exactly with Brockelmann's fem. form. The
>masc. (which I referred to as feminine in my posting for reasons we
>all know) is given as sab`atú: by Br., and as sab`atu: by Grande
>without accent marking, but with a long final vowel (B.M.Grande,
>Vvedenie v sravnitel'noe izuc^enie semitskix jazykov, M. 1972). In
>both forms the -ú: corresponds to Arabic -un.

That's impossible, because Arabic -un normally corresponds to Ge'ez -0.
Unlike what happens in the nouns, the nominative -u has apparently been
mostly preserved in the Ge'ez numerals, so the only explanation I can think
of for these forms in -u: is that they are the numeral <sab`atu> + the
definite article -u (< *-hu), which I believe _is_ stressed.

>By Sarauw's rule a structure *sab`atum should have accent on *-úm. I
>do not understand why you explicitly apply the rule to mean accent
>on -át-.

Because mimation and nunation do _not_ affect the place of the stress.

>Is Brockelmann's accent marking wrong? If so, why did he
>give it? The rule seems to work fine in the fem., which corresponds
>to Arabic sab`un and has indeed accented the reflex of -u- + final
>nasal.

I hope you don't mean in Arabic, where the stress is sáb`un (and the -un
isn't even written, as usual).

As to Ge'ez, the feminine is actually given as Ge'ez <sab`u>, <säb`u> or
<sêb`> in all modern sources I have (Lipin'ski, Jouni Maho's website
http://www.african.gu.se/maho/downloads/geeztables.pdf), and as <sab`u:>
only in Möller's 1911 Semitic-IE vergleichendes Wörterbuch. Möller doesn't
give the masculine, so all I have is <sab`atu>, <säb`âtu>, <säb`âtä> and
<säba`tu>.

We must be dealing with some obsolete convention for transcribing Ge'ez
including the article -u. Come to think of it, Ge'ez doesn't even have a
grapheme /u:/ (nor a phoneme), so that must definitely be -Cu-u.


=======================
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
mcv@...