Bit at a Time Bible Hebrew -- dagesh redux

Call this an advanced lesson on dagesh. I told you previously that one of the rules governing dagesh is using it after a short vowel. I also told you that it occurs in piel and hitpael verbs. You have seen it in other places, or you will see it, as you keep reading Torah.

There are three situations which some writers refer to as gemination and there’s a lot of history behind that. I don’t agree with some of what I’ve read on the subject. My classification is this.

True gemination in verbs occurs only after a short vowel. It is marked by dagesh in Hebrew. Arabic does a similar thing; its sign is called shadda. Verb gemination in Hebrew applies regularly throughout the conjugations in the binyanim UNLESS it would fall in a guttural (alef, heh, chet, ayin) or resh.

The piel, pual, and hitpael binyanim are famous for gemination. Other Semitic languages function like this.  Akkadian geminates in the middle of its II-stem, cognate to piel, and the related stem which is much like the hitpael. Assyrian has the II-stem like its parent Akkadian. Arabic does it in Form II and Form V which is cognate to the hitpael. Ugaritic does it in the D-stem and the related stem that uses a t-infix.

Assimilation is the disappearance of a letter in one or more binyan, with dagesh in the following letter. This happens in nifal in Hebrew, and in the cognate Akkadian and Assyrian IV-stem. It also happens in hitpael, quite rarely; the premier example is Numbers 22:25 where the ass pushes herself into the wall.

Arabic has an “assimilated” verb root class but it does not use dagesh.  These are verbs starting in waw, not nun.

Contraction is where two identical letters appear in sequence, and they contract into one. This happens in some parts of the conjugation of polel verbs in Hebrew.  A polel verb has a root with the second and third letters identical. One example is bishesh, “was embarrassed.”  Some polel verbs drop the third root letter in nifal, if they have that binyan, but there’s no dagesh in the remaining letter because it is deduplicated. There are some examples in Torah.

There’s a problem between what is a stem (or Form in Arabic) and what is a verb root class. The polel is a verb root class in Hebrew. Its appearance in various binyanim is the evidence that it is not a binyan (or Form). Arabic has the “doubled” verb root class which is cognate to the polel and the various Forms in Arabic show up in verbs of this root class.

Cyrus Gorden mistakenly labeled his “L” class (in Ugaritic) a stem; it’s the same thing as polel.  Likewise, he mistakenly named his “R” class a stem; it’s a quadriliteral verb root class, both halves of  which  are identical.  Hebrew has them:  hitmahmeah.  Arabic has  them, and they conjugate in more than one of the Forms.  Gordon made his mistake due to a historical concept which some scholars of Semitic languages disagree with.

One more subject, something people wrestle with in their street language which  is also complicated in Biblical Hebrew.

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