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Re: Arabic affixation

From:David Peterson <thatbluecat@...>
Date:Friday, February 6, 2004, 5:29
Trebor wrote:

<<Could anyone give me a list of the possible combinations of Arabic infixed
vowels and affixes, and their meanings, or a list of necessary concepts if one
was to create a language based on triconsonantalism.>>

Okay, this isn't as bad as asking for a list of the transitive and
intransitive verbs of English, but man!   It's kind of like asking a roomful of
physicists, "Can you explain to me what physics is and how it relates to humans?"
What you should do is find an Arabic grammar book or a TY Arabic book with a
good apendix and look in the back (or the front).   The reason is that there are
(if I'm remembering right) 14 different /awzaan/ (patterns) for Arabic nouns
(14 singular, 14 dual and 14 plural, I should say), plus exceptions, and 10
different for verbs (disregarding the person endings, which is a different set of
tables).   To give this as an example (with the traditional faa 'ayn and laam
root) would be more than any one person could be expected to do.

To give you an idea, in general, of the basic kinds of things you'll find,
though:

CVCVC
CVCCV
?VCCVC
tVCVCVC
CVCCVC
maCCVCV

There will be lots of different vowels in for those V's, though, long and
short.

-David