Everything about Quadriliteral totally explained
In the terminology used to discuss the grammar of the
Semitic languages, a
quadriliteral is a consonantal root containing a sequence of four consonants (instead of
three consonants, as is more often the case). A quadriliteral form is a word derived from such a four-consonant root. For example, the abstract quadriliteral root t-r-g-m / t-r-j-m gives rise to the verb forms תרגם
tirgem in
Hebrew and ترجم
tarjama in
Arabic, meaning "he translated". In some cases, a quadriliteral root is actually a reduplication of a two-consonant sequence. So in Hebrew דגדג
digdeg means "he tickled", and in Arabic زلزال
zalzāl means "earthquake".
Generally, only a subset of the verb derivations formed from
triliteral roots are allowed with quadriliteral roots. For example, in Hebrew the
Pi``el, Pu``al, and Hitpa``el, and in Arabic forms similar to
the stem II and stem V forms of triliteral roots.
Traditionally in the Semitic languages, forms with more than four basic consonants (for example consonants not introduced by morphological inflection or derivation) were occasionally found in nouns — mainly loanwords from other languages — but never in verbs. However, in modern Israeli Hebrew,
syllables are allowed to begin with a sequence of two consonants (a relaxation of the situation in early Semitic, where only one consonant was allowed), and this has opened the door to apparent five root-consonant forms, such as טלגרף
tilgref "he telegraphed". But,
-lgr- always appears as an indivisible cluster in the derivation of this verb, so that these five root-consonant forms don't display any fundamentally different morphological patterns from four root-consonant forms (and the hypothetical term "quinqueliteral" would be misleading if it implied otherwise).
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