Page:Gesenius' Hebrew Grammar (1910 Kautzsch-Cowley edition).djvu/61

 contracted from an original ay. Against this, however, it may be urged that the Phoenician inscriptions do not usually express this ê, nor any other final vowel.

(b) The employment of to denote ô, û, and of  to denote ê, î, may have resulted from those cases in which a  with a preceding a was contracted into au and further to ô, or with a preceding u coalesced into û, and where  with a has been contracted into ai and further to ê, or with a preceding i into î (cf. § 24). In this case the previously existing consonants were retained as vowel letters and were further applied at the end of the word to denote the respective long vowels. Finally also will in the first instance have established itself as a vowel letter only where a consonantal  with a preceding a had coalesced into â or ā.

The orthography of the Siloam inscription corresponds almost exactly with the above assumptions. Here (as in the Mêšaʿ inscr.) we find all the long vowels, which have not arisen from original diphthongs, without vowel letters, thus, , (or ); , , ,. On the other hand (from mauṣaʾ),  (from ʿaud);  also, if it is to be read, is an instance of the retention of a  which has coalesced with i into î. Instances of the retention of an originally consonantal as a vowel letter are, , and , as also. Otherwise final ā is always represented by :, , ,. To this alone would form an exception (cf. however the note on, § 96), instead of  (Arab. yaum) day, which one would expect. If the reading be correct, this is to be regarded as an argument that a consciousness of the origin of many long vowels was lost at an early period, so that (at least in the middle of the word) the vowel letters were omitted in places where they should stand, according to what has been stated above, and added where there was no case of contraction. This view is in a great measure confirmed by the orthography of the Mêšaʿ inscription. There we find, as might be expected, (= Daibōn, as the Δαιβών of the LXX proves),  (ô from au), and  (ê from ai), but also even  instead of  (from hauš-),  =,  four times,  once, for  and  (from bait);  = ,  =  or.