Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Yitzhak Sapir <yitzhaksapir AT gmail.com>]

Samuel Arnet wrote:
> No. This is *not* a matter of pausal (LF^MOW) versus contextual 
> (L:MOW) forms. LF^MOW may often stand in pause, but the 
> contextual form is the same, see Job 24:17; Ps 66:7; 119:165; Isa
> 16:4 etc.
> 
> Yes, sorry. I should have written "in the Genesis *19* passage 
> mentioned above ...", where K.:MOW appears (not L:MOW). What
> I wanted (but obviously failed) to say was that both the form 
> L:MOW and K.:MOW are lemmas for themselves, probably 
> variants of L: and K.: respectively, but without any pronominal 
> suffix. - L:MOW in fact only occurs 4 times (Job 27:14; 29:21; 
> 38:40; 40:4).

It would seem then that L:MOW is the appropriate counterpart
to K:MOW and B:MOW and always appears before the word
it relates to.  Perhaps when L:MOW became archaic, LFMOW 
developed as a way to relate to some other part in the sentence
that didn't follow it, and again, while it had a tendency to be used for 
plurals, this was not always the case.  In this reconstruction,
LFMOW never had an independent existence outside "archaic
poetic language," whereas L:MOW did, like K:MOW and B:MOW
still do.

Yitzhak Sapir