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March 05, 2021

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Title: Demonstratives in Semitic.
Author : The Journal of the American Oriental Society
Release Date : January 01, 2007
Genre: Social Science,Books,Nonfiction,
Pages : * pages
Size : 245 KB

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1. INTRODUCTION Semitic languages employ a wide variety of demonstrative pronouns to express basic deictic categories. These pronouns commonly reflect a bipartite system that distinguishes between near and remote deixis. Most West Semitic languages use a reflex of a basic element *[delta]V: for near deixis in the singular, as, for example, Hebrew ze (ms) *[delta]i, Biblical Aramaic da(') and Ge'ez za (fs) *[delta]a, while far deixis is either expressed by a suffix -k or the anaphoric pronoun, as in BA dek (ms) and Ge'ez zeku (ms) *[delta]ik(u), Hebrew hu(') and Old South Arabian h' / hw' (3ms anaphoric pronoun). (1) WS near demonstratives in the plural are most commonly construed around a base 'Vl(lV), as in Hebrew 'elle, Old Aramaic 'l, BA 'elle and 'el, while far deixis is, again, expressed by suffixed -k or the respective anaphoric pronoun. Akkadian, the only East Semitic language for which we have sufficient evidence for the deictic system, differs from most classical WS languages in that it only uses one base for all forms of the pronoun expressing near deixis and a second base for far deixis, both of which are fully declined for gender, number, and case. Neither the pronoun for near nor that for far deixis in Akkadian reflects the common WS demonstrative base *[delta]V:.