Is it possible to move from non-concatenative to concatenative morphology?

Question

I've been wondering whether it is possible for a language to move from non-concatenative (root-and-pattern, Arabic-style) morphology to concatenative type known from the Indo-European languages? If any language has undergone such a change, what were the reasons behind it?

Answer 1

The closest example I can think of is Maltese---while Maltese started off as a pretty garden-variety Arabic dialect, over the centuries it absorbed a bunch of words from Romance sources (both the Venetian dialect and Standard Italian, I think). While the words in Maltese of Arabic origin still have non-concatenative morphology, the words of Romance origin mostly use concatenative morphology.

This is unlike other Arabic dialects, which have taken in words from European languages but then apply the root and pattern system to them (e.g. the English word "film" got borrowed into Standard Arabic and has the non-concatenative plural "aflaam"). So Maltese has shifted away from the "everything is non-concatenative" system of the other Arabic dialects to a system that is more like "Arabic words are non-concatenative and Romance words are concatenative."