The Biblical Hebrew Feminine Singular Qal Participle: A Historical Reconstruction

What it is about

The feminine singular qal active participle has an untidy paradigm: absolute forms in -â (qōṭəlâ, qōṭēlâ) beside segolate forms in -et (qōṭelet, qōṭalat near gutturals, rarely qōṭalt), construct only in -et, and suffixed forms with an a-vowel and a t before the suffix (qōṭalt-). The author reconstructs a single Proto-Hebrew form *qōṭiltu with the -t ending (the participle, unlike ordinary nouns, prefers -t). The absolute -â forms were made later by analogy with the noun system's preference for -â. The suffixed qōṭalt- forms arose after segolization, by analogy with qeṭel nouns and the -elet ending, helped by the interplay of segol with pataḥ and ḥireq. The argument uses comparative Semitic data, the Masoretic vocalization and the distribution of the six forms over the syntactic environments.

Ideas

• I1. Count the six feminine singular qal participle shapes in the Torah by environment (absolute, construct, with suffix), using MACULA's morphology and the vowel pattern of the ending; put the table in the noun/verb morphology chapters as the Torah's own distribution.
• I2. A check on the morphology data: every word ending in -elet/-alat that MACULA tags as a participle should be feminine singular, and every qal fs participle should end in -â or -(e/a)t; list the exceptions as possible tagging errors or real rarities.
• I3. For the learner's paradigm table, give both absolute forms (יֹשֶׁבֶת and the -â type) as equally normal, with the note that construct and suffixed forms always take the t.

For Mova

I1 and I3 belong to The verb (participles) and 04-noun.md (feminine endings, segolates). I2 is a consistency check on the MACULA FEATS, a candidate for the known-defects list in 13-mova-tools.md (section 13). Nothing here touches prag.

Cite

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.5508/jhs.2014.v14.a9

@article{price2014biblical,
  title = {{The Biblical Hebrew Feminine Singular Qal Participle: A Historical Reconstruction}},
  author = {Price, J.H.},
  journal = {Journal of Hebrew Scriptures 14},
  year = {2014},
  doi = {10.5508/jhs.2014.v14.a9},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.5508/jhs.2014.v14.a9}
}

This page in Markdown → https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/hbo-2014-price-biblical-hebrew-feminine-singular-qal/