A Grammar of Tamashek (Tuareg of Mali)

3.1 Segments 31

(23) Geminated Counterpart of d

ddI I III a) inflectable verb stems have medial d and dd.

b) inflectable verb stems have initial d and dd

c) inflectable verb stems have medial d, nominals have dd.

tt d)II' II inflectable verb stems have tt, I nominals have d

I infer from these data that the cases of tt alternating with d are the odd
man out. It is reasonable to think that devoicing of /dd/ to tt was productive at
an earlier stage of the language, that the currently productive rule is that d is
geminated to dd, and that devoicing remains operative as a morphologically
specialized process in alternations where tt is well-established. Assuming that
the directionality of derivation is verb (input) to nominal (output), the cases of
tt (verbs) corresponding to d (nominals) have not been "updated" to conform
to the currently productive rule because the nominals have only weak influence
on the associated verbs. By contrast, where the verb has d, the nominals have
been updated. Likewise, any alternations of medial d and tt among the
different inflectable stems of a verb have been leveled out by updating tt to
dd.

3.1.1.9 Loss of stem-final semivowel

There are numerous, but mostly rather lexicalized, alternations between final w
or y and zero, suggesting that original stem-final semivowels have been lost in
some forms. For some stems, this can be seen in masculine/feminine
alternations, where the stem has a final semivowel before FeSg -t but not in
the unsuffixed masculine, as in £e-jola 'step-son' versus t-ae-jolay-t 'step-
daughter', and ά-jaeya 'great-grandson' t-a-jaeyaw-t 'great-granddaughter'.
Another pattern where the unsuffixed masculine is missing a V in addition to
the missing final semivowel is e-baegr 'floodplain', feminine (=diminutive)
t-e-bäeqvasw-t. Fuller lists of these types are given in §4.1.2.4.
Two noun stems whose Sg ends in oy are attested at least dialectally with
ablaut plurals irregularly lacking the y (24).

(24) Ablaut Plural without Stem-Final y

gloss Sg PI

a. 'carrion' t-a-maesroy-t t-l-masra

[similarly in Niger Tamajak, LTF2 124]

b. '(little) penis' t-a-zsemboy-t t-i-zamba

[PI also t-i-zambay]