Page:Gesenius' Hebrew Grammar (1910 Kautzsch-Cowley edition).djvu/271

 Arabic literary language forms the dual in the noun, pronoun, and verb, almost as extensively as the Sanskrit or Greek; but in modern Arabic it has almost entirely disappeared in the verb, pronoun, and adjective. The Syriac has preserved it only in a few stereotyped forms, with which such duals as the Latin duo, ambo, octo may be compared. In the same way, the dual of the Sanskrit is lost in the modern Indian languages, and its full use in Old Slavonic has been restricted later, e.g. in Bohemian, just as in Hebrew, to pairs, such as hands, feet, eyes, ears. On the Germanic dual, see Grimm’s Gramm., 2nd ed., i. p. 814.

Philippi, ''Wesen und Ursprung des Stat. Constr. im Hebr''...., Weimar, 1871, p. 98 ff: on which cf. Nöldeke in the ''Gött. Gel. Anzeigen'', 1871, p. 23.—Brockelmann,, p. 459 ff.

1. The Hebrew language no longer makes a living use of case-endings, but either has no external indication of case (this is so for the nominative, generally also for the accusative) or expresses the relation by means of prepositions (§ 119), while the genitive is mostly indicated by a close connexion (or interdependence) of the Nomen regens and the Nomen rectum. That is to say, the noun which as genitive serves to define more particularly an immediately preceding Nomen regens, remains entirely unchanged in its form. The close combination, however, of the governing with the governed noun causes the tone first of all to be forced on to the latter, and the consequently weakened tone of the former word then usually involves further changes in it. These changes to some extent affect the consonants, but more especially the vocalization, since vowels which had been lengthened by their position in or before the tone-syllable necessarily become shortened, or are reduced to (cf., c, k; –m); e.g. ,  (a sort of compound, as with us in inverted order, God’s-word, housetop, landlord); , ; ,. Thus in Hebrew only the noun which stands before a genitive suffers a change, and in grammatical language is said to be dependent, or in the, while a noun which has not a genitive after it is said to be in the. It is sufficiently evident from the above that the is not strictly to be regarded as a syntactical and logical phenomenon, but rather as simply phonetic and rhythmical, depending on the circumstances of the tone.