Broken plural

In linguistics, a broken plural (or internal plural) is an irregular plural form of a noun or adjective found in the Semitic languages and other Afroasiatic languages such as Berber. Broken plurals are formed by changing the pattern of consonants and vowels inside the singular form. They contrast with sound plurals (or external plurals), which are formed by adding a suffix. It is distinct from Germanic umlaut, a form of vowel mutation found in Germanic languages.

There have been a variety of theoretical approaches to understanding these processes and varied attempts to produce systems or rules that can systematize these plural forms.^[1]

While the phenomenon is known from several Semitic languages, nowhere has it become as productive as in Arabic.

Arabic

In Arabic, the regular way of making a plural for a masculine noun is adding the suffix -ūn (for the nominative) or -īn (for the accusative and genitive) at the end. For feminine nouns, the regular way is to add the suffix -āt. However, not all plurals follow these simple rules. One class of nouns in both spoken and written Arabic produce plurals by changing the pattern of vowels inside the word, sometimes also with the addition of a prefix or suffix. This system is not fully regular, and it is used mainly for masculine non-human nouns; human nouns are pluralized regularly or irregularly.

Broken plurals are known as jam‘ taksīr (جَمع تَكسير, literally "plural of breaking") in Arabic grammar. These plurals constitute one of the most unusual aspects of the language, given the very strong and highly detailed grammar and derivation rules that govern the written language. Broken plurals can also be found in languages that have adopted many words from Arabic, for instance Persian, Pashto, Turkish, Kurdish, Azerbaijani and Urdu, and sometimes exist in both a broken plural Arabic form and a local, adapted plural. E.g. in Pashto. the word for "purpose" (مطلب) can be pluralised in either its Arabic form مطالب for more formal, High Pashto, or the plural as مطلبونه in everyday speech. (Cf. the treatment of Latin words in English; e.g. the plural of index is either indices or indexes, the latter being more informal.)

In Persian this kind of plural is called jameh mokassar (جَمِع مُکَسَر, literally "broken plural").

Full knowledge of these plurals can come only with extended exposure to the language, though a few rules can be noted. One study computed the probability that the pattern of vowels in the singular would predict the pattern in the broken plural (or vice versa) and found values ranging from 20% to 100% for different patterns.^[2]

A statistical analysis of a list of the 3000 most frequent Arabic words shows that 978 (59%) of the 1670 most frequent nominal forms take a sound plural, while the remaining 692 (41%) take a broken plural.^[3] Another estimate of all existing nominal forms gives over 90,000 forms with a sound plural and just 9540 with a broken one.^[3]

Example

Semitic languages typically utilize triconsonantal roots, forming a "grid" into which vowels may be inserted without affecting the basic root.

Here are a few examples; note that the commonality is in the root consonants (capitalized), not the vowels.

• KiTāB كِتَاب "book" → KuTuB كُتُب "books"
• KāTiB كَاتِب "writer, scribe" → KuTTāB كُتَّاب "writers, scribes"
• maKTūB مَكْتُوْب "letter" → maKāTīB مَكَاتِيْب "letters"
• maKTaB مَكَتَب "desk, office" → maKāTiB مَكَاتِب "offices"

note: these four words all have a common word root, K-T-B ك – ت – ب "to write"

Patterns in Arabic

Hebrew

In Hebrew, though all plurals must take either the sound masculine (-im ים-) or feminine (-ot ות-) plural suffixes, the historical stem alternations of the so-called segolate or consonant-cluster nouns between CVCC in the singular and CVCaC in the plural have often been compared to broken plural forms in other Semitic languages. Thus the form malkī מלכי "my king" in the singular is opposed to məlaxīm מלכים "kings" in the plural.^[4]

In addition, there are many other cases where historical sound changes have resulted in stem allomorphy between singular and plural forms in Hebrew (or between absolute state and construct state, or between forms with pronominal suffixes and unsuffixed forms etc.), though such alternations do not operate according to general templates accommodating root consonants, and so are not usually considered to be true broken plurals by linguists.^[5]

Ge'ez (Ethiopic)

Broken plurals were used in some Ethiopic nouns. Examples include ˁanbässa 'lion' with ˁanabəst 'lions', kokäb 'star' with kwakəbt 'stars', ganen 'demon' with aganənt 'demons', and hagar 'region' with ˀahgur 'regions'.^[6] Some of these broken plurals are used in Amharic today, but generally seen as archaic.

See also

• Elative (gradation)
• Triconsonantal root
• Nonconcatenative morphology
• Apophony

References

External links

• Pattern-and-root inflectional morphology: the Arabic broken plural
• The Arabic Noun System Generation
• A detailed account of plurality in Arabic
• On the way to an algorithm for forming broken plurals in Arabic