216 4 Nominal and pronominal morphology
d. V-final, first Sg stem vowel short, feminine, no Sg suffix
t-e-laemse t-1-bmsa 'plain(s)'
t-e-taeqre t-l-taqga (A-grm) 'date pit'
t-e-zaerhe t-l-zarha 'jet (liquid)'e. V-final, first Sg stem vowel short, feminine, Sg with -t-t
t-a-s-ährto-t-t t-l-s-avta 'spot for pole'
t-a-s-ahrto-t-t t-l-s-arta 'herb'
t-a-saeyko-t-t t-l-saeyka (A-grm) 'grass sp.'
[PI perhaps an error for t-l-sayka]f. like (e), but PI with penultimate accent, final i treated as /ay/
t-a-s-anji-t-t t-i-s-anjay 'channel'g. like (e), but with stem-initial CC cluster
t-a-sramme-t-t t-Vsremma 'meat broth'
t-a-tbaqqi-t-t t-l-tbaqqa 'dot'
t-a-twaqqe-t-t t-l-twaqqa (A-grm) 'small quantity'h. unclustered medial C, masculine
a-saeko 1-saka 'grain measure'i. V-final, with stem-final w in PI
t-e-naelle t-l-nalwa 'thread'As in (187), the V-final PI stems in (189) nearly all have default accents
(hence antepenultimate PI accent), the exception being t-i-s-anjay 'channels'
(189-0- The minor patterns in (189.b-c) have a Sg without prefix, but the PI
does show the PI prefix i-. In (189.i), we observe an alternation of 11 in the Sg
with lw in the PI; this is reminiscent of PI stem-final w before MaPl -an or
FePl -en, corresponding to Sg stem-final V (§4.1.2.14).
As the above data show, in stem-medial position, u in ablaut plurals
correlates overwhelmingly with a full V in the Sg, and stem-medial a
correlates overwhelmingly with a short V in the Sg. However, in the course of
eliciting plurals for hundreds of nouns during lexicographic fieldwork, I did
find a few exceptions where PI u corresponded to a Sg short V, or where PI a
corresponded to a Sg full V. Most of these cases I regard as informant slip-ups,
or at best as local dialectal mutations, and follow-up checks (either with the
same informant or with others) generally produced the expected regular PI.
The one case that was verified with multiple informants is 'inter-dune interval'
(190).