The prefix conjugation in Qafar‐Saho: the survival and revival of a paradigm — Part I

Abstract

Summary It will be necessary to reserve our main conclusions and claims until after the presentation of the second case study in Part II of this paper. Notwithstanding, we feel it would be of value to offer an interim recapitulation of the main points of the case study just considered. 1. As part of its inheritance from Afroasiatic, the linguistic ancestor of Irob and the other Qafar‐Saho varieties preserved a pattern of verbal conjugation involving prefixation of derivational and subject agreement markers together with stem‐internal ablaut processes associated with mood and aspect categories. 2. The number of lexical items exhibiting this pattern of conjugation, while not negligible, was (and still is) small, relative to the total lexical stock of verbs in Irob, the vast majority of which conjugate according to another pattern. This dominant pattern was also inherited by ancestral Qafar‐Saho, though its origin was less remote than the Prefix Conjugation, belonging to ancient Cushitic, rather than Afroasi...