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A Trace of Barth's Preradical *i in Akkadian

IN 1894 J. Barth proposed that in early Semitic the nature of the preradical vowel-the vowel found between the subject prefix and the verbal stem-depended upon the quality of the vowel of the verb stem. In the case of words for which the stem vowel was u or i, the corresponding preradical vowel is to be reconstructed as a; for verbs containing a stem vowel a, the preradical vowel was i. He demonstrated clearly that traces of such a system are to be found in such forms as Hebrew yaqum, yasib (< *ya-CiC) vs. ye'or, yebs' (< *yi-CaC), yacamod, yahdrog (< *ya-GCuC, where G = a "guttural" consonant) vs. ychbas', ye 'am (< *yi-GCaC), and West Syriac ne(9)kul, ne(9)gur (< *ya-2CuC) vs. ni(9)mar, ni(9)bad (< *yi-'CaC); he also adduced evidence indicating that these correlations between preradical and stem vowels occur in Arabic dialects both ancient and modern.' Since that time H. L. Ginsberg has shown that, to the extent that one can tell from its script, Ugaritic too seems to have followed the pattern indicated by Barth.2 It is the purpose of the following pages to suggest that Akkadian as well has preserved a fossilized remnant of a vocalic pattern such as Barth describes. Despite the fact that he adduced no evidence in support of his theory from East Semitic, Barth did not hesitate to propose that the pattern which he had unearthed reached back to the common ancestor of the Semitic languages, and that the deviations from this pattern to be found among the attested languages-among them Akkadian--are the result of one or another of the two alternants expanding beyond its original domain.