Biblical Hebrew Forum

["K Randolph" <kwrandolph AT gmail.com>]

Dear Members:

I just came across a question concerning PY, PH in both its meanings.

To start out, PH, prohounced Poh, means "here". Though some of the
places, it seems that the best was to translate it, as in PH LPH,
would me as "here to there". Some of these are traditionally
understood as "mouth to mouth", but I suspect the Masoretic points are
wrong here.

PH, pronounced Peh, means "mouth".

Now here comes the tricky part: PH, when combined with a suffix
becomes PY, similar to that of the lamed hey verbs, including in the
plural construct state. The reason it is tricky is because PY also
seems to be the base form of another noun, whose dual and plural forms
may be the irregular PNYM, often translated as "face" though it has a
much broader meaning than the English word face, including a temporal
sense missing in the English term.

The reason this question came up is that I was reading in Jeremiah
29:10 and came across LPY in a context that appears to be a singular
use of LPNY. I did a quick spot check of the 263 times I found PY used
in Tanakh, and some of the times do appear to be a singular use of
PNYM, including the 43 times it is used in connection with XRB
"sword". A quick look at my concordance shows no entry of PY.

Any thoughts?

Karl W. Randolph.