The Arabic Language

ʾaṣdiqāʾu
‘friends’, broken plural of 
ṣadīq
, or 
fuqarāʾu
‘poor’, broken plural of 
faqīr
. 
In the case of human beings, the South Semitic languages, too, used a regular 
plural morpheme (in Arabic 
-ūna
/
-īna
, feminine 
--ātun
/
-ātin
). According to this 
theory, the broken plurals in the South Semitic languages were originally external 
(suffixed) forms that were used for feminine or collective nouns and became fixed 
as plurals when this category had been developed. Not all broken plurals in Arabic 
can be explained in this way, but those with a ‘feminine’ suffix may have consti-
tuted the starting point for the other patterns. Traces of internal plurals in the 
North-west Semitic languages may then be explained as old collectives or abstract 
nouns. If the origin of the internal plurals really dates back to a common Semitic 
period, they are not an innovation of the South Semitic languages but a common 
retention. It was the later development that created the distance between South 
and North-west Semitic languages in this respect.
The morphological features (the broken plurals and a few others such as the 
development of a verbal measure 
fāʿala
and a passive participle with a prefix 
m-
) 
are accompanied by common phonetic developments in Arabic, South Arabian 
and Ethiopic, as against the other Semitic languages. In most Semitic languages 
there is an opposition between 
b
/
p
, but in the South Semitic languages, including 
Arabic, 
f
corresponds to 
p
elsewhere (cf., for instance, Hebrew 
pāqad
‘to look 
after, visit’; Akkadian 
paqādu
‘to take care of’ with Arabic 
faqada
‘to lose, look for’; 
Geʿez 
faqada
‘to want, require’). Likewise, in South Semitic 
ḍ
corresponds to 
ṣ
(cf. 
Akkadian 
ʾerṣetu
, Hebrew 
ʾereṣ
with Arabic 
ʾarḍ
, South Arabian 
ʾrḍ
, all meaning 
‘earth’) and the old lateral 
*s
has become 
š
/
ś
(cf. p. 24).
There are, however, also instances in which Arabic shares features with the 
North-west Semitic languages against South Arabian and Ethiopian languages. 
One feature has already been mentioned (p. 14), the development of the personal 

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20
The Arabic Language
suffixes in the past tense. Arabic and Hebrew generalised the suffixes of the first- 
and second-person singular to 
-t-
, whereas South Arabian and Ethiopic chose 
-k-
. 
A second feature that differentiates Arabic from South Arabian/Ethiopic concerns 
the formation of the imperfect. According to most historical/comparativist 
reconstructions, proto-Semitic had three verbal tenses, an imperfect 
*yiqattVl
, a 
perfect 
*yíqtVl
and a jussive 
*yitVl
, as well as a suffix form (stative). In all Semitic 
languages, the suffix form developed into a verbal form with perfect aspect and 
eventually replaced the old perfect, which had become identical with the jussive 
because of a stress shift (
*yíqtVl
> 
yiqt
V
l
). The proto-Semitic perfect originally 
had past reference, but lost it afterwards. In Ethiopic and South Arabian, the 
proto-Semitic imperfect was maintained as 
yǝqät(t)ǝl
. This imperfect formed a 
new verbal system together with the new suffix conjugation and the jussive. In 
Arabic, Canaanite and Aramaic, the proto-Semitic imperfect was dropped and the 
perfect/jussive was adopted as the new form for the durative aspect, together 
with an indicative morpheme