Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Randall Buth <randallbuth AT gmail.com>]

>I really have no other source to state that a noun ending -OT is or may be
masculine as regards its grammar gender.>

Gender is determined by usage.
thus, meqomot tovim 'good places' is masculine.

Almost all, but not all, of the -ot masculine plurals have singular nouns that
"look" typically 'masculine', that is, without -a at the end. (Lelot
'nights' is the
only exception that comes to mind--layla 'night' as in 'laylo tov' "good 
night")
In addition, a majority, but not all, have an 'o/u' vowel before the -ot
ending, like "maqom" 'place', above..

The opposite occurs, where -im are feminine, again determined by usage,
just the way that the children learned them in the first place:
shanim rabbot, shanim tovot 'many years, good years'.
Again, the singular noun will usually 'look' feminine with an -a suffix.

(Note well: the fem. singular suffix is -a. The "-h" was never pronounced.
The older form of the singular suffix was *-at, which is why the
poss.pron. have
a 't' with them. There are possible vestigial forms of this original
't' in the HB
and certainly in inscriptions like 8th cen. Samaria, Moabite and Phoenician.
After the 't' endings dropped off in standard Judean dialect, the remaining
vowel "-a" was written with a 'h'. Before the dropping of the final 't'
there had not been any 'h' in the word ending.)

Randall



-- 
Randall Buth, PhD
www.biblicalulpan.org
randallbuth AT gmail.com
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