Re: infix

On Wed, 21 Mar 2001 19:04:21 -0500 Roger Mills <romilly@...> writes:
> I'm curious:  in all this discussion of Arabic, no one has mentioned
> /mu-/
> as in mujahid(in) 'holy warriors', < jihad 'holy war'; I assume it's
> also
> present in Muhammad, and perhaps Mubarak (leader of Egypt).  Are
> these
> lexicalized, or is mu- still as productive as the others?
-

I assume, based on Hebrew, that the Arabic _mu-_ is part of the non-root
pattern of those words.
Example from Hebrew:

root:     ShPL "low"

non-root:     muCCaC "causative-passive present tense singular male"

word:  mushpal "lowered"

Semitic triconsonantal morphology doesn't really work on infixes, it's
more of taking two patterns, one of the root and the other of everything
else, and meshing them together.


-Stephen (Steg)
 "don't you just hate it when your character is smarter than you are?"