non-concatenative morphology in written arabic?

Question

How could you explain or analyze these written Arabic from the non-concatenative morphology point of view? These verbs are derived from nouns.bakkala (to buckle)bukla (buckle)tilifu:n (telephone)talfana (to telephone)tilifiziu:n (television)talfaza (to televise)zayt (oil)zayyata (to oil)thanks in advance!

Answer 1

Many Arabic words are formed on the basis of a three-consonant (or sometimes four-consonant) root. Other consonants and vowels are added to the root in patterned ways in order to create new meanings that are related predictably to the basic meaning that the root holds. This is called "non-concatenative" or sometimes "root-and-pattern" morphology, because the derivation occurs within the word instead of adding affixes to either end.

However, many simple nouns and loan words from other languages don't have a clear root that is present in a dictionary. In these cases, speakers will often be creative in their identification of a "new" root in the word that can then be applied to other patterns.

For example, the English word buckle was borrowed into Arabic as bukla and speakers looked at that borrowed word and saw three major consonants 'b-k-l'. Once that had been identified as a "root" for the word, it was fairly easy to take a verb-making pattern like C₁aC₂C₂aC₃a (where C_1-3 stands for the consonants in the root) and apply it to the root. In this case, the pattern C₁aC₂C₂aC₃a means something like 'to make something like the root meaning', so bakkala is grammatically readable as 'to make something buckled' or 'to buckle'.

The other examples work similarly with the only caveat that while Arabic words are most often limited to three consonants per root, loan words come from other languages that do not have such constraints. So words like telephone and television become four-consonant ("quadraliteral") roots 't-l-f-n' and 't-l-f-z' and thus take the special four-consonant verb pattern C₁aC₂C₃aC₄a.