Page:Gesenius' Hebrew Grammar (1910 Kautzsch-Cowley edition).djvu/312

 So long as it was felt that  simply meant the three of the decade, the gender of the noun numbered made no difference. When, however, the consciousness of this meaning became weakened and the combination of units and tens came to be felt as a copulative rather than a genitive relation, it seemed suitable to connect only feminine nouns with the feminine form. New forms were therefore invented, both of the units and the tens, for use with masculine nouns. The former, however, no longer had the form of the but of the absolute state, clearly showing that the consciousness of the original syntactical relation in, &c., was lost. On the other hand, after the extension of these new formations to the first decade, the new feminine forms readily came to be used also in the genitive construction (and therefore in the constr. st.) on the analogy of the earlier masculine forms.

Of the first two numerals,, one, with its fem. (see § 96), may be recognized, from its form and use, as an adjective, although even so it admits of such combinations as. The numeral two, as would be expected, appears as an abstract in the dual, but, like the other numerals, can also stand in apposition to the noun numbered. In form it always agrees with the gender of its noun. Accordingly, the numerals from 1 to 10 are as follows: