Biblical Hebrew Forum

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

Uri:

On 8/18/07, Uri Hurwitz <uhurwitz AT yahoo.com> wrote:
>    As to the relationship between the two homonyms   LO   (lamed aleph -
>    "NO"),  and  LO  (lamed waw -- "TO HIM"),  here again it pays to consult
>    Arabic , because,  like in so many other cases, it preserves earlier 
> stages
>    of the language. The spelling of  "NO" in Ar.-- "LA,"  is the  
> equivalent of the
>    Heb.lamed aleph, while the spelling of  "TO HIM"  is --LaHW   pronounced
>   "Lahu". Obviously the "H" was dropped by the time of the consonsntal text
>    of the HB.
>
>
>      Interestingly the same occurs in some spoken Arabic dialects.
>
>     Uri Hurwitz

If you look at the earliest Hebrew, particularly Genesis, there are
several cases where the third person singular masculine suffix was
written with a heh; could the pronunciation have been "-ahu"? Later
contracted to -W to differentiate it from the feminine?

Karl W. Randolph.