49th Annual Meeting of the North Atlantic Conference on Afro-Asiatic Linguistics
Over the course of three days, you will hear more than thirty-five papers organised into thematic sessions, along with a keynote address. Each presentation is allocated 30 minutes, including questions and discussion. We hope you have a stimulating and enjoyable meeting.
Programme
Wednesday 30 September 2026
09:00–10:00 Coffee / welcome
10:00–10:30 Welcome & Remembering Prof. Dr. Harry Stroomer (Marijn van Putten)
Session 1 · Comparative & Historical Semitic 10:30–12:30
10:30–11:00 Simon Korneev: ‘Emphatic umlaut’ and Proto-Semitic *ḥ *ʕ
11:00–11:30 Yishai Neuman: From physical harm to speech in Semitic: Distributed evidence for an embodied diachronic
mapping
11:30–12:00 Roey Schneider: South Semitic Imperfect Patterns
12:00–12:30 Rebecca Hasselbach-Andee: The relationship of so-called “optatives” and counterfactual conditional clauses in Semitic
12:30–14:00 Lunch break
Session 2 · Berber (Amazigh) II, Egyptian & Coptic 14:00–15:30
14:00–14:30 Maarten G. Kossmann: How does Amazigh (Berber) relate to Eastern Numidian phonology?
14:30–15:00 Chris Reintges & Ruth Kramer: The morphosyntax of regular and irregular plurals in Coptic
15:00–15:30 Joseph Lovestrand: Valency-altering verbal morphology in East Chadic languages
15:30–16:00 Coffee break
Session 3 · Arabic: Morphology, Templates & Contact 16:00–18:00
16:00–16:30 Giuliano Castagna and Simona Olivieri: The pattern C1C2C3C2C3 in classical and spoken Arabic from a Semitic perspective: Form, semantics, and pragmatics
16:30–17:00 Khalsa Al-Aghbari: Exploring Omani Arabic templatic patterns
17:00–17:30 Lior Laks & Maha Nassar: Losing transitivity boundaries? Verb formation based on loanwords in Palestinian Arabic
17:30–18:00 Zuzanna Nabulssi: Corpus evidence for the functional expansion of the negator miš in written Egyptian Arabic
Thursday 1 October 2026
Session 4 · Northwest Semitic: Aramaic & Hebrew 9:30–11:00
09:30–10:00 Lutz Edzard: Infinitives of ‘primae yod’ (“pe yod”) and ‘primae nun’ (“pe nun”) in Rabbinic and Mishnaic
Hebrew
10:00–10:30 Matthew Morgenstern: On the vocalisation traditions of Mandaic
10:30–11:00 Eran Cohen: The Late Babylonian forms iššū, iššī, iššunu, and iššini: A case of pattern replication from
Aramaic
11:00–11:30 Coffee break
Session 5 · Semitic in Contact & Comparative Semitic 11.30–13.00
11.30–12.00 Mila Neishtadt: Aramaic /š/ in Arabic toponyms of the Levant
12.00–12.30 Julien Dufour: The ‘causative’ prefix of Semitic in the light of Modern South Arabian (MSA)
12:30–13:00 Cody Beasley: Anṭaynāka l-Kawthar: An interdisciplinary approach to Arabic variety
13:00–14:00 Lunch break
Session 6 · Modern South Arabian 14:00–15:30
14:00–14:30 Imar Koutchoukali: The prohibitive ʕan in and around the Indian Ocean: observations from Omani Arabic and Soqotri
14:30–15:00 Radwa Fathi: The external marking of feminine gender in Omani Mehri
15:00–15:30 Amir Azad al-Kathiri & Anton Kungl: Personal names, nicknames and name-giving amongst the Jibbali/Shahri (gəblɛt/̄ɬħərɛt)̄-speaking communities of Dhofar
15:30–16:00 Coffee break
Session 7 · Scripts, Epigraphy & Writing Systems (+ Berber) 16:00–18:00
16:00–16:30 Benjamin Suchard: Reconstructing the North Semitic letter names
16:30–17:00 Ahmad Al-Jallad & Alessia Prioletta: The origins of the Ethiopic script reconsidered
17:00–17:30 Tal Bernstein, Letizia Cerqueglini & Shai Gordin: Modelling Egyptian–Phoenician lexical contact in epigraphic corpora
17:30–18:00 Kamal Nait Zerad: Expressive suffixes in Berber
Keynote Address 18:00–19:30
18:00 Prof. Dr. Enam Al-Wer University of Essex
Friday 2 October 2026
Session 8 · Berber (Amazigh) Linguistics I 9.30–11.00
09:30–10:00 Jeffrey Heath: Tamashek ablaut
10:00–10:30 Aicha Belkadi: On the grammaticalisation and functions of discourse connectives: Examples from Taqbaylit Berber
10:30–11:00 Marijn van Putten: Berber “regularly irregular” long verbal noun prefixes in light of Zénaga Berber evidence
11:00–11:30 Coffee break
Session 9 · Arabic Dialectology & Sociolinguistics 11:30–13:00
11.30–12.00 Luca D’Anna: An ecolinguistic account of ق in Arabic before the q / g split
12:00–12:30 Phillip Stokes: An archaic modal distribution in some modern Arabic dialects and its implications for Central Semitic reconstruction
12:30–13:00 Adam Pospíšil: Secondary syntactic and pragmatic functions of auxiliary verbs in colloquial Arabic
13:00–14:00 Lunch break
Session 10 · Chadic & Cushitic 14:00–15:30
14:00–14:30 Joseph C. Lovestrand: Towards a typology of tense–aspect–mood in Chadic
14:30–15:00 Lameen Souag: Mubi morphology revisited in the light of sound change
15:00–15:30 Anbessa Teferra: An arrogant mouse said to a cat, “Come on, let’s wrestle.” A linguistic analysis of Sidaama wellerisms
15:30–16:00 Coffee break
Session 11 · Afro-Asiatic Varia 16:00–17:30
16:00–16:30 Jean Lowenstamm: An ‘obscure’ class of verbs – Weak quadriradicals in Chaha
16:30–17:00 Maarten Mous, Derek Nurse, Bonny Sands, Mauro Tosco, Martin Walsh & Ed Elderkin: Dahalo(an) as the original language of the speakers of the Ma’á/Mbugu mixed language
17:00–17:30 Dominique Caubet: Pantelleria Araba? A little-described situation: 9th–19th century
17:30–18:00 Massinissa Garaoun: A study of Amazigh place-names of anatomical origin in the Canary Islands
18:00–18:15 Closing
Acknowledgements and Business Meeting