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
editEntries 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.