Biblical Hebrew Forum

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

> >>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.

Right. In my opinion, even medial schwa is a reduction of the epenthetic.
What I meant is, "immediate reduction." Say, davar - dvarha, and back to
davarha in pausal. In other words, pausal form returns the word to the
status quo ante, what it have been before the stress shift. But preposition
lamed is always with schwa, so the return to status quo ante doesn't bring
kamatz.

>
> 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.

You see yourself that these are very narrow cases. lecha - lach is not a
simple expansion, but rather redistribution. With final a lost, we see the
return to the so-called feminine form lach.
lama likely got kamatz because ma is traditionally unstressed. I don't see
such peculiarities with lamo.

> 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.

The otherwise reasonable supposition that la- is rediced to l: when
pro-pre-tonic, and retains kamatz when pre-tonic seems torpedoed by l:ha
(here lamed has schwa even while pre-tonic).
But, anyway, not all lamo are pausal. Perhaps we can state thus: some pausal
lamo might be equal to lmo, but not all lamo are equal to lmo.

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 emphatic lmo) includes a pronoun (l:hem:o).


Vadim Cherny