Problems of the Dual in Soqotripublished or submitted for publicationis peer reviewe

Fox, Samuel E.

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Studies in the Linguistic SciencesVolume 5, Number 2, Fall 1975PROBLEMS OF THE DUAL IN SOQOTPISamuel E. FoxSoqotri is a language of the Southern group of the Semitic far"ily,spoken on the island of Spqotra in the Indian Ocean. Other rodemrepresentatives of this group include the modern Ethiopian languages,and the closest relatives of Soqotri, Mehri and Shauri . Our knovledpeof the Soqotri language is chiefly a product of a linguistic expeditionto the island at the turn of the century. The data fror the textspublished by this expedition were collated and edited by V'olf Leslau(1938). It is on Leslau's dictionary that this paper is based.In this paper I v/ill attempt a comparative and internal recon-struction of a group of Soqotri nouns which are attested in both theirsingular and dual forms. In order to carr>' out this reconstructionone must first be aware of several facts about this language. In Soqotri,accent is normally on the penultimate sylla'ble, though there are some,apparently random, cases where the accent is earlier. In addition,Soqotri, as a Semitic language, is presumably descended from a iiarentlanguage in which nouns were follov/ed by a case ending v/ith a shortvowel, and in some forms by an n or £ as well. In classical Arabic thecase endings take the forms -un, -an, and -iii for the indefinite nounsin the singular, and -u, -a, and -i_ for definite singular nouns . InSoqotri the case endings for singular' and broken plural nouns havecompletely disappeared. Thusmorqaji meraqih stick (sing, and plural)rey ir'es head (sirg. and plural)That the dual suffix in Soqotri is -i_ can be seen from a numberof nouns which have no other alternation between their singular anddual forms. For examplegadl -i braidberk -i knee?arhiyeb-i Icind of treeIn Classical Arabic, nouns appearing before major breaks take onthe pausal form, which involves the drop of case endings for the singularand a change of the feminine marker from -at^ to -ah. For example, wehave the following Classical Arabic words, in their full and pausal forms:70tawriatun t awTl ah tablemudarrisun mudarris teacher1 uy atun luyah languageThis pausal form has become widely generalized in Modem Standard Arabic.In spoken dialects this trend is carried further, and the final h^ ofthe pausal forms is dropped altogether.In Soqotri nouns there is a similar phenomenon. As v;e have noted,the singular case endings have been dropped, evidently as a result ofuniversal generalization of the pausal forms. However, Soqotri hasseveral separate forms of the feminine ending:-oh; bioh mother-eh: hegiyeh wall- ah : mqeydah big potThe Classical Arabic pattern, with only one form of the femininemarker (-at^) seems to be a reflection of the proto-Semitic situation.The origin, then, of the variety of forms in Soqotri is unclear.The original t_ of the feminine is preserved in the dual, where itis followed by -i_. In some cases, we find an alternation between ani^ in the dual form and an e^ in the singular. For example, v;e have?eyreh ?eyriti lake^ebeh Jebiti rabbitThere seems to be no conditioning factor to explain the fact that somenouns ending in -eh^ change their e^ to i^ before the dual, while others,like ?arhiyeb,do not. If seems most reaacmable tc explain tht Intima-tion- as the result of phonetic split, due to a lowering of i^ to £before h, a change attested in Gothic and Old Norse, for example; cf.Wright 1954:27 and Gordon 1927:255. We can then reconstruct an originalpattern with four variants of the feminine ending: -it , -et , -at , -ot ,which, as the result of the lowering of i^ to £, is sintplifie.d to -eh, -ah,-oh in the singular.There is, however, evidence to show tliat there has been a re-interpretation of this rule as one of raising--a regressive assii-'ilationof the e^ to the following i^.The first piece of evidence which suggests that this may be thecase is the relative size of the group showing this alternation comparedto that with unchanged e. We have 13 words attested with the alternation.71and only six without it. This seems a likely result of the rear a lysisof the alternation as a raisinp process, and of an inconiplete spread ofthe resulting new rule to other words with the termination -eh_. (T!iisis, admittedly, a very weak argument, because of the small size of thecorpus available and the element of chance involved.)More substantial support for the theory that a variable raisingrule is spreading across the language is provided by another group ofnouns which show an alternation involving the insertion or deletion ofa sequence eh .Singular(1)72firehim , in which i^ alternates v.'ith ehi as the eh- insert ion rule (1)predicts. On the other hand, a merger of i_ and £ incorporated into theeh-insertion rule would predict that all instances of i^ should alternatewith ehe , and thus would wrongly predict *firehein.Me posit, then, two separate developments, the second of which isnot yet complete.(i) V -* ehV/VC^ -- C#(ii) e ^ i/-- Ci#We emerge with four patterns:*firim *firimi *sibrer *sibreri *kiben *kibeni *tebor *tebori(i) firehim - sibreher - kibehen - tebehor(ii) - - - sibriri - - - -This e:q)lanation, it should be pointed out, still leaves t\ o wordsunaccounted for, rebehon and qehelihen . They may perhaps be due toinaccuracies in the transcription; in any case, a larger body of datawould be needed before it could be hoped that a reasonable explication ofthese forms could be found.We have seen in two distinct cases evidence of a variable rule whichraises some instances of e^ before a dual suffix, while leaving othersuntouched. Additional evidence can be found in a fev; other ivords whichshow raising elsewhere than in the feminine marker:mahber mahbiri hundredte'e ti 'iti sheep'ed 'idi handSelhel gelili little wadiTliat this process is sporadic outside of the feminine suffix and casesof eh-insertion is shown by the existence of v\rords like ?arhiyeb v/hichshow no change in the dual ( ?arhiyebi) . As stated earlier, the originof this rule seems to be the reinterpretation of the original rule, whichlowered i. to £ before the h of the feminine suffix.It still seems rather strange that the destressed vowels of wordslike mizer should have acquired an eh^ which leads to sequences of twosuccessive syllables with short vowels, rather than simply beinplengthened to [V:]. In order to shed some light on this, let us turn toanother set of words, one of which we have just seen in another context.73Some nouns show an alternation in singular and dual forrs v.'hich involvesthe presence or absence of h alone, rather than eh^. Thus, alongsideqarrrehem-qarmemi v.'e have qanther-qanteri. Similarly v.'e findserher sereri sparkther teri entrancefa?har fa?ari young bullSelhel selili little wadiWe have no way of predicting which of these two forms (h or eh) willoccur, if one appears at all. The h appears to be associated with a fir.alliquid, but this is not a sufficient condition, there being some wordswith inserted eh which also conclude with liquids, such as sibreher andmizeher. There is no simple solution to this problem, but the followingconjectural explanation appears to account for the facts well.As a first step in our explanation, we will assume that forms like*qarmemV , concluding with a short vowel case ending, reacted initiallyto loss of their final vowels and the resultant shift of stress by asinple lengthening of the originally penultimate vowel. Thus, *qarreirVfirst became *qarmem .Soqotri has a number of words, such as sohor "thorn", and ^cher"month", which contain the pattern VhV , and in which the h seems to beunderlying. If, for some period in the past, a variable rule appearedwhich deleted h,sequences of the type VhV would have alternated with VV,that is V. Tlie long vowels thus created would have merged with otherlong vowels, such as those resulting from compensatory lengthening inwords like *qarmem .The surface alternations created by this variable rule now could begeneralized to those forms which had long vowels from other sources,such as *qarm5m , on the basis of the model£ : ehe£ : X = ehc .Notice that this cannot be considered a rule generalization, but must bea surface generalization. For the rule accounting for the model alterna-tion £ : ehe is one of deletion of underlying /h/. Forms like *q armer ,however, lack an underlying /h/ which can be deleted.Subsequently, the variable rule deleting h apparently was again droppedfrom the grammar. On the other hand, the ehe of forms like *qarreher!.74not being derivable from underlying /ehe/ and thus not affected by thisnale loss, remained and had to be accounted for by the synchronic gramt^ar.^parently this was done by a reinterpretation of ehe as eh_ + e^, i.e. aseh- insertion, for this pattern has spread to several other nouns; cf.examples (7), (8), and (9) in Table I. Thus we have fidehon in place ofthe expected *fidohon , and firehim instead of *firihim. '"e can summarizethese steps in the following tabular form.qarmemV teborVqarmgm teborloss of caseendingsanalogicalqarmeheir. tebohorh- insertionspread of_ tebehoreh patternThe introduction of the h into a group of singulars provides vihatmay be interpreted as a singular marker, in opposition to the -i^ whichmarks the dual. This encouraged one more analogical change, this timeinvolving words like Selhel . If these words originally had h^ in boththe singular and dual forms, it would have become variable like all othersduring the period of our posited h-deletion rule. When the h becamestable again and/or emerged as a singular marker in forms like qarmehem,by analogy the h^ would have been retained in the singular ( selhel) anddropped in the dual, yielding *§eleli , and after raising Selili , the actualform.By our hypothesis, then, a series of reanalyses of situationsresulting from variability resulted in a new system of marking fcrnuiriber in this group of Soqotri nouns. This is particularly interestingsince it involves an interplay of rule action and surface analogy. Fora similar case see Hock 1975.. The role of variability in restructuringcan be seen to be important in providing an explanation for this problem..I should add, however, one important caveat about this case. Tlie materialon which this paper is based was collected in an early expedition, andperhaps as a result, is hardly a model of consistency. It would be ofgreat interest to have a new collection of data for checking purposes,to gather new forms, and to measure the progress of change in this languageover the last three-quarters of a century.75NOTESThe expedition of the Austrian Royal Academy of Science of 1899,the results of which are partly contained in Mtiller's Mehri und SoqotriSprache .2An attempt to account for this rather unnatural rule v.'ill bepresented below.REFERENCESGordon, E.V. 1927. An introduction to Old Norse. Oxford: ClarendonPress.Hock, Hans Henrich. 1975. Current trends in historical linguistics.Proceedings of the First Annual Meetinp of the Kentucky Inter-disciplinary Conference on Linguistics. Louisville: Inter-disciplinary Program in Linguistics, University of Louisville.Leslau, Wolf. 1938. Lexique soqotri. Paris.MUller, Heinrich. 1902. Mehri und Soqotri Sprache. Vienna: AlfredHtilder.Wright, Joseph. 1954. Grammar of the Gothic language. 2nd ed. London:Oxford University Press.

Problems of the Dual in Soqotri

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