Over a century ago Jakob Barth suggested,' in what has come to be known as Barth's Law,that the quality of the vowel following the consonantal pronominal prefix in the G-stemdepends on the thematic vowel of the verbal base, i.e., a dissimilarity between the twovowels. Thus, the assumed Proto-Semitic [henceforth: PS] forms are: *ya-qtul, *ya-qtil and*yi-qtal. Since that time, this law has been confirmed from various facts in the variousbranches of the Semitic languages.
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