© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2010 DOI: 10.1163/187666310X12688137960669 Brill’s Annual of Afroasiatic Languages and Linguistics 2 (2010) 23–79 brill.nl/baall Materials and Language: Pre-Semitic Root Structure Change Concomitant with Transition to Agriculture Noam Agmon * Institute of Chemistry, he Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Jerusalem 91904, Israel agmon@fh.huji.ac.il Abstract Materials and language have evolved together. hus the archaeological dating of materials possibly also dates the words which name them. Analysis of Proto-Semitic (PS) material terms reveals that materials discovered during the Neolithic are uniquely triconsonantal (3c) whereas biconsonantal (2c) names were utilized for materials of the Old Stone-Age. his establishes a major transition in pre-Semitic language structure, concomitant with the transition to agriculture. Associations of material names with other words in the PS lexicon reveal the original context of material utilization. In particular, monosyllabic 2c names are associated with a pre-Natufian cultural background, more than 16,500 years ago. Various augments introduced during the Natufian, and perhaps even more intensively during the Early Neolithic, were absorbed into the roots, tilting the equilibrium from 2c toward 3c roots, and culminating in an agricultural society with strictly triconsonantal language morphology. Keywords Semitic languages; Levant; transition to agriculture; biconsonantalism Introduction he origin of one of the most useful human “inventions”, language, is shrouded in mystery. Ancient language study relies on written documents. Yet the inven- tion of writing, which evolved almost simultaneously in Egypt and Mesopo- tamia, about 5,200 years Before Present (bp) 1 , occurred much later than the *) his article includes an Etymological Appendix by Yigal Bloch, Department of Jewish History, he Hebrew University, Jerusalem 91904, Israel. I have benefited from discussions, references and comments from Yigal Bloch, Edit Doron, Eran Cohen, Steven E. Fassberg, Shlomo Izre’el, Paul V. Mankowski and Alexander Militarev (linguistics), Ofer Bar-Yosef, Anna Belfer-Cohen, Leore Grosman, and David Wengrow (archaeology/prehistory), and Amotz Agnon (Geology). We are grateful to the editors of BAALL for advice and assistance. Work supported by he Hebrew University Program for Converging Sciences (2007). 1) All dates are in the calibrated 14 C scale. bp=bce+1950.