Apophony - Transfixation

Transfixation

See also: Amharic language#Archaic forms, Broken plural, and Triconsonantal root

The nonconcatenative root-and-pattern morphology of the Afro-Asiatic languages is sometimes described in terms of apophony. The alternation patterns in many of these languages is quite extensive involving vowels and consonant gemination (i.e. doubled consonants). The alternations below are of Modern Standard Arabic (the symbol ⟨ː⟩ indicates gemination on the preceding consonant):

word	gloss	alternation pattern
katab	"to write"	(a - a)
kataba	"he wrote"	(a - a - a)
kaatab	"to correspond with"	(aː - a)
kattab	"to cause to write"	(a - ːa)
kuttib	"to be caused to write"	(u - ːi)
kitaab	"book"	(i - aː)
kutub	"books"	(u - u)
kaatib	"writer"	(aː - i)
kuttaab	"writers"	(u - ːaː)

Other analyses of these languages consider the patterns not to be sound alternations, but rather discontinuous roots with discontinuous affixes, known as transfixes (sometimes considered simulfixes or suprafixes). Some theoretical perspectives call up the notion of morphological templates or morpheme "skeletons".

It would also be possible to analyze English in this way as well, where the alternation of goose/geese could be explained as a basic discontinuous root g-se that is filled out with an infix -oo- "(singular)" or -ee- "(plural)". Many would consider this type of analysis for English to be less desirable as this type of infixal morphology is not very prevalent throughout English and the morphemes -oo- and -ee- would be exceedingly rare.