Adjectives and their nominal patterns in Semitic Jacob Jan de Ridder 1 Abstract Semitic languages have a large number of nominal patterns for adjectives, the most common of which are *qatal, *qatil, *qatul and *qatāl, *qatīl, *qatūl. These can have a stative or patient character, if the adjective is associated with a transitive verb in similar fashion to the participle (*qātil), which functions as agent noun. With the exception of the participle, adjectives are usually independent of the verbal stem. However, East Semitic and Ethiosemitic languages show evidence for verbal adjectives derived from the secondary verbal stems. The present study will discuss the possible original adjectival patterns in Semitic languages based on the distribution and function of patterns in the various languages as well as adjectives that can potentially be reconstructed to the Proto-Semitic stage. Keywords: adjective, participle, nominal pattern, Proto-Semitic, verbal root 1. Introduction Adjectives are an interesting category of words in Semitic languages. 2 They are morphologically similar across all the Semitic languages, yet are usually not reconstructed to a Proto-Semitic stage. Grammatical studies often refer to a verbal adjective, which suggests a derivation from a verb. This description fits well if we take the Arabic qatīl ‘killed’ as being a verbal adjective from qatala ‘to kill’. Nonverbal adjectives may occur in Semitic languages and usually concern augmented patterns with a ‘nisbe’ ending. This suffix generally builds adjectives from toponymy, e.g., Arabic arabī ‘Arabic’, but building from deverbal nouns may also be found, e.g., suḫrī ‘target of ridicule’ from suḫra ‘laughing stock’, which in turn is derived from saḫira ‘to mock’. Akkadian has some loanwords used as adjectives, although they are rare. In particular, there are some indeclinable cases like talmu ‘big’ and sillūnu ‘old’, which are only used to describe traits of goats and other livestock. The present 1 Philipps-Universität Marburg, Centrum für Nah- und Mittelost-Studien (CNMS), Fachgebiet Altorientalistik. Deutschhausstraße 12, 35032 Marburg, +49 6421 28- 24953. Email: deriddej@uni-marburg.de. 2 I thank N. J. C. Kouwenberg and M. P. Streck for reading and commenting on an early draft of this paper. DOI: 10.13173/9783447121729.31 This is an open access file distributed under the terms of the CC BY-SA 4.0 license. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en © by the author