Page:Compendious Syriac Grammar.djvu/51

§§ 20. 21. system are found also in other uses: thus, for instance, we may meet with an upper point lending emphasis to the word in a summons, a command, an interrogation. Such a point is not distinguishable in all cases, so far as appearance goes, from the points treated of in sq.

§ 20. Every word and every syllable commences with a consonant. That no word can begin with a vowel sound is expressed clearly in Semitic writing by [preceding such sound], e. g.  āthē, or rather ʾāthē "comes";  ʾurḥā "a way";  ʾīδā "hand," &c. In cases like "knew", the word is spoken as if it stood  ʾīδaʿ, and so it is even written at times.

No Syriac word begins originally with a double consonant. Yet such a consonant seems to have been produced by the falling away of a very short vowel in, štā, štīn (as well as , ) "six", "sixty" (in East-Syriac also,  "the sixth"; cf. the forms for sixteen ); in the later pronunciation still oftener, and even in other cases, as perhaps in  ksē from ke̊sē "covered".

§ 21. The West-Syrians appear to have lost long ago the original doubling of a consonant; the East-Syrians seem generally to have retained it: the former, for example, pronounce "people",  ʿamō, the latter  ʿammā. Nearly every consonant then is to be held as doubled, which is preceded by a short vowel and followed by any vowel, thus "murdered",  "takes" are pronounced qaṭṭel, nessav.

The absence of doubling may be relied on only when a softened consonant continues soft, e. g. ʾethā "came", not ʾeththā, for this softening, or assibilation, is inadmissible in a doubled letter; while on the contrary the hard sound in such a consonant after a vowel is a sure