qal

A suppletive formation: The third-person forms of the perfect are from Arabic قَالَ (qāla, “to say”); all other forms are from أَعَادَ (ʔaʕāda, “to repeat, say repeatedly”).

The use of the latter verb in the imperfect tense is somewhat understandable, because one will more often mention the fact that someone says something repeatedly or generally, rather than that they are saying something right now (though, of course, the imperfect is also used for the future). More surprising is perhaps that أَعادَ (ʔaʕāda) also conquered the first and second persons of the perfect. This, in turn, could be due to a parallelism with other verbs with a long stem vowel (“hollow roots”), where these forms are phonetically closer to the imperfect than to the third person (cf. sab, sibt, isib, or kien, kont, ikun).

• IPA^(key): /ʔaːl/

qal (imperfect jgħid, past participle moqul or mequl or maqul)

1. to say; to tell

qal

1. water
2. river
3. a certain constellation, a somewhat triangular arrangement of stars

• qalʼ

• Lawrence R. Morgan, Kootenay-Salishan Linguistic Comparisons. A Preliminary Study (thesis, Vancouver, University of British Columbia, 1980), page 95
• Ronald Leroy Olson, The Quinault Indians: Adze, canoe, and house types of the Northwest (1967)