On Thu, 20 Nov 2003 13:19:38 +0100 (MET), Harald Hammarstrom
<
haha2581@...> wrote:
>The -at- for abstract nouns somehow sounds familiar but I can't really
>see it as definite. In Ar. the plurals for some masc. nouns have -at-
>and I guess those can be called collective. But those classes are very
>limited and I don't know it ouside Arabic. Some infinitives have -at-
>but that's clearly syllable-conditioned. What else are you referring
>to?
There are abstract nouns in various Semitic languages using suffixes in -t
(-at-, -a:t-, -u:t-, -i:t-). Lipin'ski gives Akk. paha:tu "governor",
s^arru:tu "kingship", Arab. xali:fat- "deputy, successor", Hebr. h.okmo:t
"wisdom", malku:t "kingship", Ge'ez na'asa:t "youth". The forms with long
vowel can be taken formally as plurals, and Lipin'ski doesn't give many
examples with plain -at-.
Still, the standard explanation for feminine -at- is that it developed out
of a collective
Quoting jer on pieml from a while back:
"As for the link between the feminine and the collective, I have worked
that out - only to find that I had been anticipated. Von Soden wrote in
his grammar of Akkadian from 1952, on the occasion of the exact same
semantic link between feminine and collective seen in Semitic, that herd
animals form groups containing a multitude of females and mostly only a
single male. I wrote the same thing in the Schindler memorial volume
almost half a century later. This is a fact of nature that anybody can
observe: the many are the females - visit a farm if you can still find
one."
[I should add that I personally don't agree with that explanation, at least
for PIE, where I think the feminine suffix *-ih2 (thematic *-eh2) derives
from a diminutive **-iq].
=======================
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
mcv@...