Segolates are words in the
Hebrew language
Hebrew (; ; ) is a Northwest Semitic language of the Afroasiatic language family. Historically, it is one of the spoken languages of the Israelites and their longest-surviving descendants, the Jews and Samaritans. It was largely preserved ...
whose end is of the form CVCVC, where the
penult
Penult is a linguistics term for the second to last syllable of a word. It is an abbreviation of ''penultimate'', which describes the next-to-last item in a series. The penult follows the antepenult and precedes the ultima. For example, the main ...
imate vowel receives
syllable stress. Such words are called "segolates" because the final unstressed vowel is typically (but not always) ''
segol
Segol (modern he, סֶגּוֹל, ; formerly , ''səḡôl'') is a Hebrew niqqud vowel sign that is represented by three dots forming an upside down equilateral triangle "ֶ ". As such, it resembles an upside down therefore sign (a becau ...
''. These words evolved from older
Semitic words that ended in a complex
coda; indeed, when a suffix (other than an absolute plural) is added to a segolate, the original form (or something similar) reappears (cf. ''kéleḇ'' "dog" vs. ''kalbī'' "my dog").
Examples:
The ancient forms like ''*CawC'' (such as ''šawr'' "bull") almost universally evolved to non-segolate ''CôC'' ( šôr), though there are exceptions, such as ''mā́weṯ'' "death".
Some segolate words' final syllable ends with a
patach
Pataḥ ( he, פַּתָּח ', , Biblical Hebrew: ') is a Hebrew niqqud vowel sign represented by a horizontal line underneath a letter. In modern Hebrew, it indicates the phoneme which is close to the " sound in the English word ''far'' an ...
rather than a segol, due to the influence of guttural consonants (, , , ) in the final syllable.
Classical Arabic still preserves forms similar to the reconstructed Ancient Hebrew forms, e.g. ''ʼarḍ'' "earth", ''kalb'' "dog", ''ʻayn'' "eye", ''ṣidq'' "sincerity". (Some modern dialects insert an
epenthetic
In phonology, epenthesis (; Greek ) means the addition of one or more sounds to a word, especially in the beginning syllable ('' prothesis'') or in the ending syllable (''paragoge'') or in-between two syllabic sounds in a word. The word ''epent ...
vowel between the final two consonants, similar to what happened in Hebrew.)
Hebrew language
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