Anyone who studies any of the Semitic languages, and is as fascinated by morphology as I am, will generally end up a little disappointed with most grammars.
I still remember great frustration as an undergraduate student, leafing through Haywood and Nahmad’s Arabic grammar, when I got to “verb forms” to be told there are more than verb forms I-X, here’s a little bit about Form XI, but forms XII to XV are so rare, “you really don’t need to know about them”. This for me was red rag to a bull and began in me a personal quest to find the rarest and most ridiculous examples of verbs and nouns and draw conclusions for myself about what they might mean. Even my tutor at the time was fairly dismissive – “well, one of the forms relates most commonly to graves and how they look”.
Suddenly, learning about the مبتدأ and the خبر and the pecularities of Arabic grammar was a pointless distraction from my quest – much more important for me was to page turn Lane’s two-volume Arabic dictionary. This became an introduction to morphology for me and the beginning of a life-long fascination with words and how they work. With hindsight, I should have studied the extensive Arabic grammatical tradition in its own right, but at the time, I would search out new grammars and new descriptions of Arabic morphology in English, French or German and glean what I could of them.
Then I discovered two books – the Cambridge series on the Semitic languages, a comprehensive summary of ancient and modern Semitic languages, and Semitic Noun Patterns, by Joshua Fox, who has since moved on to other things and is a major loss to the world of philology.
This book is an extraordinary work. Anyone able to reconstruct proto-Semitic patterns from modern, medieval or more ancient versions of the Semitic languages, with all the caveats he has to give around the instability of the current forms, has extraordinary mental capacity just keeping in his head all the possible proto-Semitic permutations of a Mehri or Aramaic word. Of course, Arabic, with its extraordinarily conservative consonantal and vocal phonology is often a great assistance in this work, yet it can also be a red herring. Arabic, par excellence, appears to have taken this non-concatenative, root-and-pattern morphology to its extreme, applying patterns to nouns that, when reconstructed to Proto-Semitic with the benefit of other examples, had no such pattern. One example he gives is ‘غُراب’ or ‘raven’ which in Arabic, and in Arabic uniquely, has the pattern ‘فُعال’, a pattern associated in Arabic with birds and insects. How much of this was genuine development of language and how much was medieval Arab grammarians and lexicologists having their own perverse kind of fun with language we will never know. Speaking with an Egyptian work colleague in translation however, he waxed lyrical about how a new word already instinctively gave him clues about what it might be, even if he had never encountered its like before. What an extraordinary feature of language this is!
Other examples from Arabic or other Semitic languages include فِعل for patient nouns or nouns of result, فُعول for animal enclosures, فعيل for nouns associated with agriculture and harvesting, فُعُل for nouns associated with the sides of things, فَعَل for meteorological phenomena, and فُعُلّا for legal activities.
So has my quest completed? Well, no. While he covers nouns (substantives and adjectives), he leaves out verbs, and also covers the main nominal forms – leaving the relatively predictable implications of m- prefixation and the ta’ marbuta to us to work out in most instances. By and large, this is a sensible point to draw a line in such a major work – he has few other restrictions both on the forms he analyses and the languages he draws in, but it does leave me wondering about the prominence of forms such as اُفعولة for literary genres, فَعُلاء for days of the month, مفعوعلة for places where things are found in abundance, and the like, as well as the peculiar and pervasive quadriliteral verbs we find in every dialect of modern Arabic, but rarely in the Classical and Standard form.
The Genealogy of Us 
