To: "b-Hebrew Digest" <b-hebrew AT franklin.oit.unc.edu>
Subject: Re: Psalm 11:7c
Date: Fri, 5 Feb 99 21:46:51 -0000
Peter Kirk wrote:
>The following is intended to be a list (from the WTS database) of all
>the forms ending in -MOW in the Hebrew Bible, excluding cases of nouns
>and verbs ending in -M with the -OW 3rd person singular suffix. Note
>that these references are almost all in poetry.
(list snipped)
>It is interesting that these forms are all defined as "X3mp" which
>means "with third person plural pronominal suffix", except for the
>prepositional forms B.:MOW, K.:MOW and L:MOW/LFMOW and the one
>occurrence of (FL"YMOW in JOB 22:2. I guess this is because WTS parsed
>these semi-automatically and did not attempt to decide which are
>plural. Probably this is a case where old manual methods are better
>than modern technology. But I also still wonder if modern comparative
>linguistics can help to answer whether this suffix can really be both
>singular and plural, or if we have to look for such explanations as
>"dignified singular".
I can't help with modern comparative linguistics, but I plan to go over
this list and see what the suffix really means. I'll post my results
then. Thanks to Peter for coming up with the data.