Biblical Hebrew Forum

["VC" <vadim_lv AT center-tv.net>]

> On your theory, how would you get the possessed form malki from melk?

Easily. Since suffix is stressed, tzere loses its stress. Unstressed tzere
turns into patah or hirek quite commonly.

> And how would you get the different paradigms beged > bigdi, neged >
> negdi, sefer (first vowel is tsere) > sifri?

Losing its stress to the suffix, tzere mainly turns into patah or hirek.
Phonemic subtleties are behind less common negdi (because of the nasal?),
sefer.

> >In general, would you recall segol-compensatory shortening of any other
> >sound than tzere?
> Two segols more or less implies a segolate noun or adjective, so this
> question becomes circular.

Not really. mahberet, cotevet. But catavt.
You see, two segols arise only from tzere-shva, not even from kamatz-shwa.
Even more importantly, the same first vowel produced both two segols and
patah or hirek. Kamatz cannot produce hirek, as in sifri. Only tzere can do
this.

>But here is an example: yedkem, with two
> tseres, from yad + -kem.
No good. We discuss two segols, not two tzeres.

>The cognate of Hebrew 'erets has an initial a vowel in
> Ugaritic, Aramaic, Syriac, Arabic, Soqotri and Mehri, which is a fairly
> good indication that the "a" vowel (also found of course in many Hebrew
> forms) is original and the segol a modification of it, rather than vice
> versa.

Why? In these languages (not sure about Soqotri and Mehri), aleph is more
like A, not AE, as in Hebrew. So, naturally, first aleph in eretz turned the
word into aretz. The same happened in Hebrew because of hey commonly
attached to eretz.