Page:Gesenius' Hebrew Grammar (1910 Kautzsch-Cowley edition).djvu/281



Thus the original is (a) contracted in the ''3rd sing. masc. and throughout the plural, as, , &c.; (b) retained unchanged in the 1st sing. , the real suffix-ending  (see b) being united with the final  of the ending ; and in the 2nd fem. sing. , with a helping''- after the. On the other hand (c) the of  is lost in pronunciation and the ă lengthened to ā in the 3rd masc. sing., i.e. sûsāw (pronounced susā-u). The 2nd masc. sing. and the 3rd fem. sing.  were formerly also explained here as having really lost the, and modified the a of sûsakā, sûsahā to ; but cf. the view now given in g and k.

Rem. 1. As represents sûsai-nû, so  and  represent sûsai-kā, sûsai-hā, and the use of  instead of the more regular  is to be explained from the character of the following syllable,—so P. Haupt who points to  as compared with. In support of the view formerly adopted by us that the is only orthographically retained, too much stress must not be laid on the fact that it is sometimes omitted, thereby causing confusion in an unpointed text with the singular noun. A number of the examples which follow may be due to an erroneous assumption that the noun is a plural, where in reality it is a singular, and others may be incorrect readings. Cf. (probably is intended),, , ; for other examples, see  ff. (but in ff. always ),, , ,  (probably, however, in all these cases the sing. is intended);   (cf. v. 5);  , ;. For the orthographic omission of before suffixes cf. for, ;  (but it is possible to explain it here as a collective singular); , , ; ,  ( from  which is always written defectively);  ;  ;  ; ,  (but see c), cf. and. The