from qǝltu to gǝlǝt
27
have had the same uniform -ki form as JB and CB, but the change to the gǝlǝt forms was not purely phonetic in that case either. 3.4. Application of the Low Vowel Raising Rule When OA /a/ in a stressed open syllable is followed by /a/ in the next syllable, it is as a rule—with many exceptions—raised to /i/, which is realized as ǝ or u, depending on the consonant environment, e.g., sǝmač ‘fish’, sǝma ‘sky’, ğǝbal ‘mountain’; ḅuṣal ‘onions’, gumar ‘moon’, kuḅar ‘to grow up’ (Blanc 1964:40). Because this rule is operative in verbs as well, the sedentary-type perfect base patterns CaCaC and CiCiC10 in Form I of the triradical strong verb have been transformed into CiCaC, with a phonetically-conditioned allomorph CuCaC: kitab ‘to write’, giṭaʿ ‘to cut’, buram ‘to twist’; šǝrab ‘to drink’, nǝzal ‘to descend’, wugaʿ ‘to fall’. Interestingly, this systematic Bedouin-type phonetic change did not affect the rather unsystematically distributed q reflex of *q (2.1.2. above), which seems to indicate that the q reflex in this group of items was well established before the low vowel raising rule became operative. 3.5. Use of /-t/ as the 1st p. sing. Morpheme in the Perfect, Instead of /-tu/ Typical of the qǝltu Dialects This change implied also neutralization of the former morphological contrast 1st p. sing. vs. 2nd p. sing. masc. in the inflection of the perfect. Concomitantly, the rural and Bedouin /-tū/ morpheme of the 2nd p. plur. used in the adjacent areas replaced the qǝltu-type morpheme */-tum/. 3.6. Use of āni as the 1st p. sing., ǝḥna as the 1st p. plur. and ǝntu as the 2nd p. plur. Independent Personal Pronoun Instead of the qǝltu-Type Forms ana, nǝḥna and ǝntǝm Here MB follows the patterns commonly used in the Bedouin dialects of the Syrian-Mesopotamian group and the gǝlǝt dialects spoken in
10 JB has only one pattern, CaCaC, whereas CB has two, CaCaC and CiCiC, which are used also in the qǝltu dialects spoken in Anatolia, Mosul, Tikrīt, Dēr ez-Zōr, and Albū Kmāl (Blanc 1964:40; Johnstone 1975:92; Jastrow 1978:146-157; Behnstedt 1997:264-267; Abu-Haidar 1991:42-43). This indicates that also the former qǝltu-type MB had these two patterns.