Biblical Hebrew Forum

[mjoseph <mjoseph AT terminal.cz>]

Peter Kirk wrote:

>The following is intended to be a list (from the WTS database) of all 
>the forms ending in -MOW in the Hebrew Bible, excluding cases of nouns 
>and verbs ending in -M with the -OW 3rd person singular suffix. Note 
>that these references are almost all in poetry.

(list snipped)

>It is interesting that these forms are all defined as "X3mp" which 
>means "with third person plural pronominal suffix", except for the 
>prepositional forms B.:MOW, K.:MOW and L:MOW/LFMOW and the one 
>occurrence of (FL"YMOW in JOB 22:2. I guess this is because WTS parsed 
>these semi-automatically and did not attempt to decide which are 
>plural. Probably this is a case where old manual methods are better 
>than modern technology. But I also still wonder if modern comparative 
>linguistics can help to answer whether this suffix can really be both 
>singular and plural, or if we have to look for such explanations as 
>"dignified singular".

I can't help with modern comparative linguistics, but I plan to go over 
this list and see what the suffix really means. I'll post my results 
then. Thanks to Peter for coming up with the data.

Mark Joseph