4 ms·
Yea it goes further than that in Arabic. In the example of r s e only vowels were modified for tense in Arabic you will add consonants to radically change the m
by getcrunk 8y ago
Yea it goes further than that in Arabic. In the example of r s e only vowels were modified for tense in Arabic you will add consonants to radically change the meaning. Same in hebrew as another commenter showed much better than I did
- thaumasiotes 8y agoChanging the vowel to form a causative verb from a base verb goes a little farther than "only vowels were modified for tense". It's a productive system in modern Arabic and a fossil of earlier times in modern English, but it's not different in kind.
- gumby 8y agoThe root properties of Arabic go far beyond the example you gave of schwache Verben in germanic languages or the historical PIE/PIG roots that give us names like Rhine/Rhône (i.e. Fluß). For example the word (as written) k-t-b (كتب) means "write" but could just as much mean letters, writer, books etc; these stems are really how you think of the word at a much deeper level than you get out of English etymology[+] or (IMHO) Hanzi radicals. Arabic has some limited case, but the grammar is quite different from PIE languages, lacking a "to be" verb and adjectival/adverbial distinctions (a fast car and a car that was swift are differentiated only by the article).
- gumby 8y agoOh I forgot my footnote [+] I really love that English is pretty conservative in spelling so that you can often tell the meaning of the word by looking at how it is written. Languages like German that reform their spelling periodically to match pronunciation shifts snip those connections away (while French goes the other way...there's a reason why a spelling bee can be prime time television in France).