Like Arabic, Berber has 'verbal nouns' or 'maṣdars', nouns that express the action in a nominal way.
In Arabic, the verbal noun form, especially of the basic verb stem is very difficult to predict, and in dictionaries you'll often find 3 or 4 different formations which may be possible.
Berber also often has quite difficult to predict verbal noun formations, although for some languages Verbal Nouns are significantly easier to predict than for others. Awjila and Ghadames for example have quite easily predictable verbal noun formations.
Surprisingly though, many of these verbal noun formations look 1. Nothing like each other, 2. Nothing like verbal noun formations in the dialects that are more 'irregular'.
In Ghadames the Verbal Nouns are regularly formed by taking the Negative Imperfective stem of the verb, and adding the noun prefix *a-. Irregular verbal nouns exists, and they looks like more common Berber formations. It seems that Ghadames therefore innovated a completely new class of Verbal Nouns. Kossmann (2013: 87) gives an indication how Ghadames managed to develop a completely new verbal noun system, while not completely losing the original one. He says that there is often a difference in semantics, where the original Verbal Nouns are more 'nouny', e.g.:
atikər'the act of stealing' vs. tukərḍa'theft' < okər'to steal'
atəmud'the act of praying' vs. am(m)ud'prayer' < mud'to pray'
Unlike Ghadames, the Awjila verbal nouns are not as transparently derivational, and the origin of a new system, and parts of the verbal noun formations are clearly part of the old system.For example the verb aker'to steal' has a verbal noun ukur with the pattern uCuC, which is found for ever single VCC verb. VCC verbs in other Berber languages generally have the pattern aC:aC, which is found for one verb arev'to write' v.n. arrav. That formation is not derived from a negative imperfective like Ghadames, nor is it derived from the more common form aC:aC. The way this formation came to be is therefore unclear.
Unless another explanation presents itself, it seems to me that Awjila probably created a new productive verbal noun system as well, but the exact motivations and origins of the forms are a lot less clear than what we find in other Berber languages.
The next post we'll discuss Verbal Nouns in a broader Berber perspective, and we'll talk just how odd the formations really are.