WHAT IS A ROOT in Arabic ? (Wiktionary Development Blog #1)

[@mikhailabunidal9146]

20:24-20:27 أسلم = صار مسلم ☪ Aslam = Saar mislem = to convert to Islam / to become Muslim

[@m.anissard5199]

The roots are subjugated to patterns thats why they change their form to give new meanings. When the extra letters are added to the 3 root letters(الجذور المجردة)they are always considered extra letters and not necessarily part of the 3 root letters. When the 3 weak letters form part of the root they are considered deficient roots because the weak letters are never stable and always change their form and sometimes even change sound or transform into another vowel. They always change their form to adapt to the new patterns.

[@m.anissard5199]

They even sometimes disappeared

[@mikhailabunidal9146]

24:54-25:00 خلي بالك لمين ما قاري هالملاحظة : عيد / يعيد هو بينقال وبس في الشمال فلسطين 🇵🇸 (كما معروف ايصا: الجليل) Keep in mind to whoever reads this comment : 3ayyad /i3ayyed is only said in the north of Palestine 🇵🇸 (aka Galilee)

[@ThatBernie]

I think this it's an interesting question whether some roots could be considered to be "derived" from other roots, e.g. your examples of how the four-letter root فرجى (as in يفرجي) might be derived from the three-letter root فرج, or the four-letter root أسلم (as in يأسلم) could be derived from the three-letter root سلم. I think there are a couple things to tease apart in this question, the first of which is what do we mean by "derive." We could mean it in an etymological or historical sense, in the same way that we say that the English word 'question' is historically derived from the Norman French 'question' which in turn is derived from the Latin 'quaestiō'-that's a diachronic perspective. The synchronic perspective is about whether this derivation could be said to be an active part of a speaker's grammar, in the same way that 'unhappy' is derived from 'happy' by the addition of a prefix, i.e. this derivation is part of the speaker's language as it exists in their mind right now. The diachronic point is easier to make, it seems pretty clear that فرجى is derived from فرج and أسلم from سلم in a this sense. The synchronic point is trickier though, because the idea of roots being derived from other roots goes against the very concept of a "root" in the first place-these are supposed to be the most primitive elements in the lexicon. If one wants to argue for a synchronic derivation of roots like فرجى and أسلم-which I am sympathetic to myself, although I think it would need to be more robustly demonstrated both theoretically and experimentally through morphological priming experiments for example-then one needs to reconcile the above dilemma, which is how can we even consider something a "root" when it is (synchronically) derived?

[@ThatBernie]

There are several different ways to reconcile this issue depending on one's theoretical framework. If one wants to take a Lexicalist approach (whether the Weak Lexicalist Hypothesis which holds that derivational morphology happens in the pre-syntactic lexicon, or even the Strong Lexicalist Hypothesis which holds that all morphology happens in the pre-syntactic lexicon) then one would need to differentiate between a "root" in the Semitic sense i.e. a sequence of consonants (usually 3 but sometimes 2 or 4), and a "root" in the sense of most primitive unit in the lexicon-perhaps we could call the former S-roots and the latter L-roots. Thus all L-roots would be S-roots, but not all S-roots are L-roots-some S-roots, such as فرجى and أسلم are in fact themselves derived, and thus are not morphological primitives i.e. they are not L-roots. However Lexicalism has become the minority position in Morphology, and currently the dominant theoretical framework is Distributed Morphology (DM) which posits that morphology and syntax are intimately intertwined, and that all morphological operations happen through the very same mechanisms that drive syntax, namely Merge, head movement and so on. On the face of it, it would seem that DM might have a tougher time handling this problem, since roots are also considered to be the most primitive units (along with categorizing heads) in this theory, and thus it is not possible for one root to be derived from another. However one needs to remember that roots in DM are considered to have no phonological content until Spell Out, which is when the syntax/morphology is all done and the whole thing gets shipped to phonology. And thus when a root is notated as e.g. √slm in DM one must remember that this has nothing to do with the consonants [slm] all throughout the derivation, and it's only once Spell Out happens that it acquires this phonological information-and moreover the rules by which this is done, i.e. Spell Out rules, can be context-dependent and thus the very same root may have different exponents that are contextually determined. Thus the root morpho-syntactic context will determine its phonological shape-although this should only happen in a way that respects locality restrictions, such as the strict linear adjacency hypothesis. Now I'd be interested in working out how this could potentially be modeled!

[@PalWebTV]

for the record my analysis is generally very synchronic when it comes to the dialect. well that's especially because usually those who take a diachronic point of view when describing the etymology of words tend to say that - for instance - active participle "X" is inherited from MSA "X" rather than being derived from a certain verb Y that exists in the dialect. i am certainly not trying to reinvent the wheel by any means - however i lean toward the analysis of فعلى as being an innovative form in the dialect derived from فعل is a regular way. it's Occam's Razor in a way - this is much neater than saying that it's from the root ف ع ل ى & then getting stuck arguing on the relation between the "root" ف ع ل ى vs. ف ع ل ... *however* i'm not sure what criteria need to be met to make such an assertion. i can only immediately think of 3 terms in total in this form (farša / ṭaʕma / farja) so it's not exactly productive. moreover it may or may not be the result of some sort of distortion of Form 2 (although not sure if that would disqualify it from being an innovative form). that being said just because a form is no longer productive doesn't mean it can't be counted as a form - albeit a marginal one. Form 4 is a very marginal & non-productive form in the dialect that probably would have been altogether lost if not for the diglossic situation. anyway email me if you'd like to continue the conversation because some of this went over my head & i would like some reading recommendations. cheers

[@nouramerlot]

I do better learning vocab in chunks/categories than as isolated words. Therefore, in my opinion, I'd find it more beneficial (and interesting) to use the roots as semantic categories than to create separate entries due to a stray consonant here or there.