Reconstruction talk:Proto-Semitic/ʔaḫwat-
ʾaḫawt- in fact and not *ʾaḫwat-[edit]
@Wikitiki89. I think the Proto-Semitic word for “sister” is ʾaḫawt-, with feminine suffix -t, hence the plural ʾaḫawāt- is more sensible. The Proto-Semitic feminine suffix is primarily -t, not -at. So writes Marijn van Putten (I don’t have a paper in mind right now): “The general feminine ending is *-t in both Berber and Semitic; Semitic also points to a by form *-at (which becomes the regular form in Arabic). It has long been recognised that Berber and Semitic share this.” I.e. Arabic and Ethiopian are innovative by putting -at everywhere, Aramaic depicts the original endings.
So I have just created *ʾamt- (“maidservant”) as this seems a more likely baby word (?) than *ʾamat- also for the parallelism to *ʿabd- and that unique -h- infix in the Hebrew word and for the Akkadian. So I opine that the recto page should be moved and {{sem-decl-noun-f}} bifurcated. *šamāy- (“sky”) bears a third feminine suffix. Fay Freak (talk) 00:23, 25 September 2018 (UTC)