Father, brother, and father-in-law as III-w nouns in Semitic

In this paper, I argue that the Semitic kinship terms * ab-'father', * a - 'brother', and * am- 'father-in-law' originally ended in a w, which left traces in several of their forms. In the singular, the w contracted with the case vowels leaving a distinctive pattern of short and long vowels in the unbound, bound, and suffixal forms. In the plural, the w was retained in several languages due to the insertion of an a-vowel between the final two root consonants, a common Afro-Asiatic pluralization strategy: * abw- > * abaw. I further suggest that the West Semitic plural morpheme -aw was derived by analogy with the plurals * abaw and * a aw, and is not, as commonly suggested, an inherited Semitic or Afro-Asiatic plural marker.