A historical relationship has long been suspected between the Northwest Semitic existential particles like Biblical Hebrew יֵשׁ and Biblical Aramaic אִיתַי , negative existentials like Syriac layt ... Show moreA historical relationship has long been suspected between the Northwest Semitic existential particles like Biblical Hebrew יֵשׁ and Biblical Aramaic אִיתַי , negative existentials like Syriac layt and Akkadian laššu, the Arabic negative copula laysa, and the East Semitic verbs i-ša-wu “to exist” (Eblaite) and išû “to have” (Akkadian). But due to various formal and semantic problems, no Proto-Semitic reconstruction from which all these words can regularly be derived has yet been put forward. This article argues that the Akkadian sense of “to have” is typologically the oldest and reconstructs a Proto-Semitic grammaticalization of *yiyθaw “it has” to *yθaw “there is/are”. Also in Proto-Semitic, a negative counterpart was formed through contraction with the negative adverb “not”, yielding *layθaw and *laθθaw. Show less
