Wiktionary:About Proto-Berber
Proto-Berber is a reconstructed language, representing what Maarten Kossmann describes as a Roman-era koiné ancestral to all extant Berber languages. It is established through the comparative method (though not all reconstructible items should be reconstructed, due to historical considerations). Proto-Berber is this sense is not meant to include the language ancestral to the Libyco-Berber inscriptions nor to the extinct Guanche language (or its lexifier, if it was not in fact Berber).
Notation[edit]
Entries should be whole reconstructed words, not just roots. Furthermore, all morpheme boundaries should be broken with hyphens, including the nominal prefix.
The following notation is used on Wiktionary:
- Vowel phonemes
| Front | Central | Back |
|---|---|---|
| i | ə | u |
| e | ă | |
| a |
The vowel *ə is thought to result from a merger of *ĭ and *ŭ, but as the timing of this merger and its reconstruction is unclear, *ə can be reconstructed unless there is strong evidence for either *ĭ or *ŭ.
| Labial | Dental | Postalv./ Palatal |
Velar | Uvular | Glottal | ||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Plain | Pha. | Plain | Lab. | ||||||||||
| Nasal | m | mm | n | nn | |||||||||
| Stop | b |
bb |
t d |
tt dd |
ḍ |
ṭṭ |
ḱ ǵ |
ḱḱ ǵǵ |
k g |
kk gg |
ggʷ |
qq |
ʔ |
| Fricative | f β |
ff |
s z |
ss dd |
ẓ |
ẓẓ |
š |
šš |
ɣ |
||||
| Approximant (Lateral) |
y | yy | |||||||||||
| l | ll | ||||||||||||
| Trill | r | rr | |||||||||||
See Wikipedia on Proto-Berber phonology, which is based on Kossmann (1999). This system is revised, with the consonant system almost unchanged, but the vowel system taken from van Putten (2018). Prasse's *H is considered to belong to a stage prior to Proto-Berber.