Abstract This paper surveys the distribution of the suffix /-(ə)m/, which marks the masculine plural on verbs in Mehreyyet, a Modern South Arabian language spoken in the Dhofar region of Oman. It argues that the suffixation is phonologically conditioned: the suffix appears wherever the final stem vowel was diachronically non-low (Proto-West Semitic */i/ or */u/), which later merged and shifted to */ə/. The paper presents parallel evidence from other West Modern South Arabian (WMSA) languages, including Ħarsusi, Batħari, Yemeni Mehri and Hobyot, in which the cognate suffix appears in a wider, more generalized distribution. On the basis of this evidence, the paper argues that the restricted, phonologically conditioned distribution found in Mehreyyet represents the more archaic state, from which the broader distributions attested in the other WMSA languages subsequently developed through analogical generalization. The implications of these findings for the reconstruction of the ProtoMSA plural marking system are briefly considered.
Roey Schneider (Fri,) studied this question.