...The personal suffix. In other words, here we don't have HINNEHA or HINNEH HI', "here she is", but just HINNEH, "here is ..."
I accept that Hebrew sentences can be verbless without being
ungrammatical. But what looks ungrammatical here is the absence or
elision of the personal suffix HINNEH. But re Gen 18:9 BDB mentions "the
suffix ... being not infrequently omitted". So perhaps this is not the
best example - it was simply the first possible one that I found.
Ugh. My BDB - along with all my other books - is packed. What suffix do you mean?
... and than I am.
It's a fascinating question, and I have no idea about the answer. I suppose the first step would be to get a full grasp of verbless clauses, but how to do that if we suspect that some of them may be ungrammatical? So we end up in a circle. Still, exploring this question might make an interesting dissertation topic for somebody a fair bit younger than I am...
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