Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Peter Kirk <peterkirk AT qaya.org>]

On 14/12/2004 18:39, Vadim Cherny wrote:

> Peter Kirk wrote:
>
>  
>
> > But if "The reduced vowel may elongate back to kamatz in pausal", lamo 
> >    
> is simply the non-pausal variant of lmo, or vice versa. <
>
> You assume that schwa in lmo is a reduction, and therefore might elongate. I 
> don't recall elongation of schwa into kamatz in l:noun form. Why should l:mo 
> elongate, then? The schwa under preposition is not an immediate reduction.
>  

I tend to assume that sheva is always a reduction, except perhaps in 
mid-word consonant clusters. I don't know if this is quite true, but 
seems to be mostly so.

Sheva after l- does expand to qamats in pause: L:KF lekha > LFK: lakh. 
L- also takes qamats and the stress before MFH ma, giving the forms 
LF^M.FH, LF^MFH and LF^MEH (GKC 102l). These are not nouns, but then we 
are not talking about nouns.

In fact one possibility is that LF^MOW lamo is a variant of LF^MFH, the 
variation perhaps being to indicate loss of interrogative force.

See also GKC 102f-i for a whole set of circumstances in which l- takes 
qamats "Immediately before the tone-syllable, i.e. before monosyllables 
and dissyllables with the tone on the penultima". At least one of these 
circumstances (GKC 102h) applies only in pause. And these are mostly 
before nouns. But these cases of l- + qamats remain unstressed.

> I think there is semantic gap between cmo, bmo, lmo, and lamo. While the 
> former preceed an object, lamo itself could be employed as an object. 
> Compare, say, cmo boker with nega lamo in Isaiah 53:8. This is why I agree 
> with Steinberg that lamo (unlike lmo) includes a pronoun (l:hem:o).
>  


--
Peter Kirk
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peterkirk AT qaya.org (work)
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