Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Henry Churchyard" <churchh AT crossmyt.com>]

In order for the name Shlomo to be "declined" in Greek (i.e. given
separate Accusative, Dative, and Genitive case forms), then _something_
had to be added onto the end of this word in the Nominative case, since
it seems that only a rather small number of feminine nouns ended in
word-final omega in the nominative singular form in Greek (while only an
even smaller number of pronominally-inflected neuter forms of function
words ended in word-final omicron in the nominative singular form).  But
I have no idea why the consonant _n_ was added to the end of the name
(as opposed to the consonant _s_, say, which would have fit in with the
patterns of Greek morphology at least as well as _n_ did); if it were
the Latin language that was in question, then this would be easy to
explain, since Latin has a large number of words that end in -o in the
nominative singular, but build other ("oblique") cases on a -on- stem
(but this is not relevant to Greek).  By the way, from looking at an NT
lexicon, it appears that sometimes the Greek oblique cases of the name
could alternatively be built on a stem Solomont- (so that the
inflectional patern of "Solomon" was then assimilated to that of active
participles).

--
Henry Churchyard   churchh AT crossmyt.com   http://www.crossmyt.com/hc/