Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Peter Kirk" <Peter_Kirk AT sil.org>]

I have noticed in passing that the plural ending -IM, generally written with
a yod mater, is found without that yod mostly in the plurals of words which
end in a yod mater and a final consonant, and (from memory) especially if
that final consonant is guttural. There seems to be a similar pattern with
the waw mater in -OT plurals after a waw mater in the final syllable.
Perhaps there was some reason, whether phonological or purely orthographic,
for a reluctance to write two identical maters in adjacent syllables.

Peter Kirk

> -----Original Message-----
> From: jeremy north [mailto:jnorthct AT hotmail.com]
> Sent: 14 October 2001 09:23
> To: Biblical Hebrew
> Subject: Matres Lectionis and Ordinals
>
>
> >From: "Henry Churchyard" <churchh AT crossmyt.com>
> >Subject: Matres Lectionis
> >Date: Wed, 3 Oct 2001 09:34:09 -0500 (CDT)
> >
> >The difference between he-pathah.-taw-dagesh-sh AT wa-shin-h.ireq-`ayin-
> >h.ireq-yod in Jeremiah 36:9 and he-pathah.-taw-dagesh-sh AT wa-shin-h.ireq-
> >yod-`ayin-h.ireq-yod in Jeremiah 36:22 is a general difference in use
> >of supplemental "matres lectiones" letters in spellings, and does not
> >show any phenomenon that is specific to or exclusive to ordinals or
> >numerals (so that your subject line is rather infelicitous).  Matres
> >lectionis are extremely simple on one level (their presence is merely
> >optional), but to try to really explain their detailed patterns of
> >occurrence and omission demands a large-scale study using high-powered
> >statistics; you could look at the Andersen and Forbes books, etc.
>
> The only problem is that there seems to be a number of variations in the
> spellings of ordinals that may or may not be explainable as plene
> spellings.
>   Take the feminine ordinal form for “seven”, for example, whose shorter
> spelling $B(YT is extended elsewhere to $BY(YT, but is also
> written as $BY(T
> (e.g., Ex 23:11, Lev 23:16, 25:4,20, Deut 15:12).  In this sense,
> I wonder
> if the so-called "plene" spelling is combining the ‘yods’ of both
> variations, and hence represents a combined form rather than an matres
> lectionis expansion as such.  It is interesting in this respect that
> Chronicles unusually prefers the shortened (defective) spelling
> of several
> ordinals (in contrast to its general preference for the plene forms of
> ordinary nouns), while the plene spelling of the same ordinals
> are found in
> abundance elsewhere in the OT (see James Barr (1989) in The Variable
> Spellings of the Hebrew Bible, pp150-54).  I wonder if, in some cases,
> scholars have been too quick to label certain spellings as being
> the result
> of matres lectionis when other processes may have been involved in their
> orthographic development.
>
> Jeremy
>