THE MORPHOLOGICAL DEVELOPMENT OF THE 3 M. SG. PRONOMINAL SUFFIX ON PLURAL NOUNS IN CLASSICAL HEBREW: PART 2

This article continues a study begun in the preceding volume of Hebrew Studies. The 3 m. sg. pronominal suffix on plural nouns is realized in several allomorphs in Classical Hebrew: in early Hebrew inscriptions, the suffix appears as and perhaps as ; in Biblical Hebrew, it usually appears as (sometimes emended from in instances of Masoretic Qere readings), and occasionally as in poetic texts. In this study, we provide a unified and principled linguistic account of these textual data, tracing the various phonological developments of the third masculine singular genitive suffix on plural nouns, and relating these phonological developments to the phonetic causes underlying them. After analyzing the phonological realizations of the high vocoids *U (/w/ and /u/) and *Y (/y/ and /i/) and of *H (found in the third-person pronominal morphemes), we identify three stages of development that produced the in Biblical Hebrew: (1) the linkage of the number-gender morpheme to a single slot in the skeletal tier (effectively yielding an early diphthong contraction *-aI > ē); (2) the deletion of *H in selected environments defined by accent and the surrounding vowels; and (3) the phonetically-motivated insertion of the glide *y in the hiatus environment [-e:w:].