Page:Gesenius' Hebrew Grammar (1910 Kautzsch-Cowley edition).djvu/200

 to regard them as representing the original stem (with two radicals), and the forms with the second radical repeated as subsequently developed from the monosyllabic stem. The appearance of a general contraction of triliteral stems is due to the fact that in biliteral forms the second radical regularly receives before afformatives, except in the cases noted in  and q. This points, however, not to an actual doubling, but merely to a strengthening of the consonant, giving more body to the monosyllabic stem, and making it approximate more to the character of triliteral forms.

The development of biliteral to triliteral stems generally takes place in the 3rd ''sing. masc. and and 3rd plur. perfect Qal of transitive'' verbs, or at any rate of verbs expressing an activity, e.g., , :  (but with suffix , ver. 11); sometimes with an evident distinction between transitive and intransitive forms, as , ; see further details, including the exceptions, in aa. The development of the stem takes place (a) necessarily whenever the strengthening of the 2nd radical is required by the character of the form (e.g., ), and (b) as a rule, whenever the 2nd radical is followed or preceded by an essentially long vowel, as, in Qal, , , in Pôʿl and Pôʿal, ,.

2. The biliteral stem always (except in and the, see below) takes the vowel which would have been required between the second and third radical of the ordinary strong form, or which stood in the ground-form, since that vowel is characteristic of the form , e.g.  answering to ,  to the ground-form qăṭălăt,  to the ground-form qăṭălû; ,  to.

3. The insertion of (mentioned under a), for the purpose of strengthening the second radical, never takes place (see ) in the final consonant of the word, e.g., , not , ; but it appears again on the addition of afformatives or suffixes, e.g. , , , &c.

4. When the afformative begins with a consonant, and hence the strongly pronounced second radical would properly come at the end of a closed syllable, a separating vowel is inserted between the stem-syllable and the afformative. In the this vowel is, in the  and  , e.g. , ,   (for sabb-tā, sabb-nû, tasōbb-nā). The artificial opening of the syllable