Similarly, when reading through Tanakh, I noticed a certain amount ofIn such cases the different words have not just different spellings, but also different morphology (the forms with final he generally have construct in -AT and plural in -OT) and different gender agreement (the forms with final he take feminine adjectives and verb endings). And there is a real pronunciation difference, at least according to the Masoretes, who never write a word final vowel on a noun where there is no mater. This implies that we are looking at more than variant spellings of the same word. And as they are different words they should not be assumed to be completely synonymous. They might have broadly the same meaning but with subtle differences. Compare French matin/matinée, soir/soirée, an/année: each pair, which differ in suffix and in gender, would by default be translated the same in English (morning, evening, year), but there is a well known and rather subtle meaning distinction. Just as these are separate dictionary entries in French, so do their Hebrew equivalents need to be, at least unless it can be proven that they are fully interchangeable.
fluidity in spelling. Possibly the most common varient is that some nouns are
written with a final heh, and a varient without the heh, but both from the
same root with the same meaning. These appear to be varient spellings of the
same word. Yet lexicographers list them with separate entries. I found myself
asking “Why?” as I found example after example.
While I don’t consider myself reductionistic, I wonder how many entries are
duplicated just from variations in spelling?
Karl W. Randolph.
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