...On your theory, how would you get the possessed form malki from melk? And how would you get the different paradigms beged > bigdi, neged > negdi, sefer (first vowel is tsere) > sifri? The whole thing is more complicated than you seem to realise, and can be sorted out only by a detailed phonological study. Harold has provided some pointers to the work on this e.g. of Coetzee.
It seems very clear to me as a linguist that surface forms like MELEK
are a recent phonological development from underlying MALK etc.
It seems not less clear to me that melek arose from melk (with tzere), not
from malk. How would the patah produce e-sound?
Two segols more or less implies a segolate noun or adjective, so this question becomes circular. But here is an example: yedkem, with two tseres, from yad + -kem. Gesenius (9f) writes: "Segol... by origin belongs sometimes to the second, but most frequently to the first vowel class... It belongs to the first class when it is a modification of a..." His evidence is mostly from comparisons with Arabic, but many of these can be confirmed by comparison with a whole set of other Semitic languages. The cognate of Hebrew 'erets has an initial a vowel in Ugaritic, Aramaic, Syriac, Arabic, Soqotri and Mehri, which is a fairly good indication that the "a" vowel (also found of course in many Hebrew forms) is original and the segol a modification of it, rather than vice versa.Hebrew inserts a vowel and makes a compensatory change to the preceding
vowel, which is not found in inflected forms.
Would you recall any instance in Hebrew when two segols arose from anything
else than tzere-shwa? Gesenius presumes they arose from patah-shwa.
In general, would you recall segol-compensatory shortening of any other
sound than tzere?
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