Morphological analysis

Each of these verbs has a prefix which is either /it/ or /id/, and the prefix transparently surfaces as one of these two variants in most examples. The first-person-singular form is marked with a suffix -ti, the third-singular feminine has the suffix -u, and the second-singular masculine has no suffix. The vowel in the second stem syllable is underlyingly the same for all verbs: this fact is not entirely obvious from these data but is made obvious by a more extensive analysis of the morphological structure of words in the language. An analysis of the phonological factors surrounding the second vowel will show that these surface variants can be derived from one particular underlying vowel. Derivationally related words, such as the root underlying iʃtaparti ‘improve’ and ʃipur ‘improvement,’ have in common a set of consonants, but their vowels differ (vowel changes are a means of indicating derivational relations in Semitic languages, which we will not be concerned with).