The biradical origin of semitic roots

Many scholars who have worked on reconstructing Proto-Semitic postulate that the original forms of the Semitic roots consisted of three radicals, with the occurrence of the infrequent biradical and quadriradical roots needing explanation (Bergsträsser, 1983). Other scholars such as Moscati et al. (1964) and Lipinski (1997) assert that Semitic roots had both biradical and triradical forms. My hypothesis consists of two parts: 1) that all the words in the first language spoken by the Semitic peoples consisted of biradicals; 2) that the majority of the postulated biradicals entered the Semitic languages after being expanded by the addition of a third radical, with the resulting triradical having a semantic relation to the original biradical. In support of this hypothesis I develop a lexicon whose content has both to satisfy the assumed communication needs of an early people and to consist of productive biradical forms that generate triradical reflexes with associated meanings in some or all of the following languages: Akkadian, Biblical Hebrew, Aramaic, Arabic, Ge’ez, Sabaean, Mandaic, Ugaritic, and Syriac. The following anomalies are discussed and accounted for within the framework of the hypothesis: that there exist biradicals in all these languages having the identical third radical and no others; that apart from the triradicals that are reflexes of the biradicals in the lexicon, there are many other triradical cognates. Parallels in Indo-European are presented to bolster the theoretical basis of the work. The resulting lexicon is compared to Phoenician and Sanskrit attested glossaries, as well as to Eurasiatic and Nostratic word lists. Since the postulated language was spoken much prior to the invention of writing, there is no means by which the hypothesis can be absolutely proven. However, this work will demonstrate that the biradicality hypothesis is both plausible and likely.