# Waters



## rushalaim

Is the word *מים* dual? Genesis 1:6-10 points "waters" at sea and "waters" in the sky.
What is _Hebrew_ singular of _"waters"_: *מִי* or *מַי* or *מיא* or *מו* or *מוא* or *מין* or *מה* or *מוה*?


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## Drink

No it is not. It is a singular that was reanalyzed as a _plurale tantum_ taking the dual form, but it is etymologically singular and so does not have a further singular form. It may in the past (pre-biblical) actually have had a plural form, but who knows what it could have been.


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## hadronic

Maybe מימות _meymot_? Similar to ליל / לילות, _layil/leylot. _


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## Drink

hadronic said:


> Maybe מימות _meymot_? Similar to ליל / לילות, _layil/leylot. _



Probably not, because the second mem is not part of the root, but is a remnant of mimation, which shows that it was reanalyzed as dual in form well before biblical times. In Arabic the cognate is māʾ, but its plural is a broken plural (miyāh), which is unhelpful to determine the would-be Hebrew plural. However, the similarly structured samāʾ (equivalent to שָׁמַיִם) has the plural samāwāt, which points to a Hebrew would-be plural שְׁמָיוֹת (heavens), which points to מָיוֹת (waters).


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## rushalaim

*hadronic*, I guess there is difference between _"night"_ and _"waters"_. The word's form *ליל* is shortened from the full form *לילה* . But Pentateuch doesn't point any *מים* with *ה* letter.

_Phoenician_: _sing._ *מוּ* and _pl._ *מֻם*
_Aramaic_: _sing._ *מַיָא* and _pl._ *מַיִן
Drink*, maybe _Hebrew_ differs from _Phoenician_ and _Aramaic_ both because of its dual invention?


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## Drink

rushalaim said:


> *hadronic*, I guess there is difference between _"night"_ and _"waters"_. The word's form *ליל* is shortened from the full form *לילה* . But Pentateuch doesn't point any *מים* with *ה* letter.
> 
> _Phoenician_: _sing._ *מוּ* and _pl._ *מוּם*
> _Aramaic_: _sing._ *מַיָא* and _pl._ *מַיִן
> Drink*, maybe _Hebrew_ differs from _Phoenician_ and _Aramaic_ both because of its dual invention?



In Aramaic, מַיָּא is the emphatic state (like Hebrew definite state הַמַּיִם) and מַיִן is the absolute state (like the Hebrew indefinite state מַיִם), so this is not a singular/plural distinction. In Aramaic, the situation is much like in Hebrew, where it is always treated as plural.

As for Phoenician, I believe these are just the mimated and unmimated forms, but are either both singular or both plural.


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## origumi

Drink said:


> No it is not. It is a singular that was reanalyzed as a _plurale tantum_ taking the dual form, but it is etymologically singular and so does not have a further singular form. It may in the past (pre-biblical) actually have had a plural form, but who knows what it could have been.


I don't think this is the explanation accepted by most linguists. Do you have an online (or printed) reference for what you wrote? Brown-Driver-Briggs, for example, say it's plural (H4325) with no further info. I guess they mean that the the "y" is part of the root, thus it looks like a dual but actually a plural

The word exists with one "m" in many Semitic languages (e.g. Ethiopic, Old South Arabian, Akkadian, Arabic, Aramaic, Ugaritic) and also Egyptian and Coptic. It exists with two "m" in Hebrew and Phoenician, with "m" and "n" in Moabite ("n" is the Moabite masculine plural sign... but maybe Moabite text like the Mesha Stele contains a true plural of a Moabite singular *"may"?). So it seems that the final "m"/"n" is a common Canaanite but not Proto-Aramaic-Ugaritic-Canaanite (North-Western Semitic) thing. The Moabite form shows that it was understood as plural. Phoenician "mem" (probably as old as the alphabet, thus very early Canaanite) can be a contracted form of "mayim", as we see in other XayiX words like kayitz / ketz  (summer).

Some assume there's a "true" plural form "memot" (long "e") as rushalaim suggested above, but I don't know what's the basis.


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## rushalaim

What about the root, is it *מוה* or *מהה* ?


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## origumi

rushalaim said:


> What about the root, is it *מוה* or *מהה* ?


Read please this reference (quoted above). It says Proto-Semitic "maw" / "may" (two variants). The Canaanite (and Hebrew) root is "my" (or "may" if we include the vowel), I believe (remember that nouns do not always follow the three-consonantial root pattern).


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## Drink

origumi said:


> I don't think this is the explanation accepted by most linguists. Brown-Driver-Briggs, for example, say it's plural (H4325) with no further info. I guess they mean that the the "y" is part of the root, thus it looks like a dual but actually a plural. Do you have any reference for what you wrote?



Maybe I didn't express myself clearly enough. What I meant was that it was _originally_ a singular (probably well before Biblical Hebrew). It is clearly dual in form, rather than plural because of the stress on the first syllable. If it had been plural in form it would have had stress on the second syllable (and maybe would have been at least sometimes spelled with two yuds). I agree that in Biblical Hebrew, it was analyzed as a _plurale tantum_, which exactly is why Brown-Driver-Briggs says it is plural. If there is still anything I am saying that you disagree with, let me know.



origumi said:


> Some assume there's a "true" plural form "memot" (long "e") as rushalaim suggested above, but I don't know what's the basis.



It looks to me like they are talking about Rabbinical Hebrew (abbreviated as RH) there, so I don't know what you mean by "true" plural, but it is a later form.



rushalaim said:


> What about the root, is it *מוה* or *מהה* ?



As I just said to you in a different thread: "Not all nouns have well-defined roots (although many do). It's only verbs that need to have a well-defined root."[/QUOTE]


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## origumi

Drink said:


> What I meant was that it was _originally_ a singular (probably well before Biblical Hebrew)


I understood what you meant, and would be happy to see the reasoning.

Regarding dual or plural: Brown-Driver-Briggs say explicitly it's plural. Maybe they think the word maintains an archaic plural pronunciation.


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## Drink

origumi said:


> I understood what you meant, and would be happy to see the reasoning.
> 
> Regarding dual or plural: Brown-Driver-Briggs say explicitly it's plural. Maybe they think the word maintains an archaic plural pronunciation.



The _form_ is dual, even if the _meaning_ is plural. Essentially, what I mean is that I'm calling _-áyim_ the dual form and stressed _-īm_ the plural form, and so all I'm saying is that מים ends in _-áyim_, at least in Tiberian vocalization. This is a fact and it does not contradict that Brown-Driver-Briggs say it's a plural, because they aren't talking about the _form_ of the word.

And regarding that it was originally a singular. Look at evidence from languages. It is singular in Arabic, Ge'ez (and other Etheopic languages), Ancient Egyptian, etc. I didn't mean that the language could still have been called Hebrew at the point at which it was originally singular.

Also, the Ge'ez plural _mayat_ supports my theoretical Hebrew plural מָיוֹת.


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## rushalaim

Sorry, guys, I really don't understand how _"water"_ could be plural indeed! The same thing with _"fear"_, for example. Right, you can say _"much fear"_, but it isn't quantitative: _"one fear"_, _"two fears"_ and so on.
I assume that _"water"_ was singular before the Pentateuch too.

What about another liquid, _"olive oil"_ for instance?


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## origumi

Drink said:


> The _form_ is dual, even if the _meaning_ is plural. Essentially, what I mean is that I'm calling _-áyim_ the dual form and stressed _-īm_ the plural form, and so all I'm saying is that מים ends in _-áyim_, at least in Tiberian vocalization. This is a fact and it does not contradict that Brown-Driver-Briggs say it's a plural, because they aren't talking about the _form_ of the word.


The question whether a -ayim form is dual or plural (or something else) cannot be answered by the stress position alone. Historical development can mislead us. Take for example צהריים - dual by your criterion, but apparently neither dual nor plural (see, again, the Mesha Stele).



> And regarding that it was originally a singular. Look at evidence from languages. It is singular in Arabic, Ge'ez (and other Etheopic languages), Ancient Egyptian, etc. I didn't mean that the language could still have been called Hebrew at the point at which it was originally singular.


The non-Canaanite Semitic languages have a singular form for water. Canaanite languages have instead something that looks like dual/plural, by adding the "m" or "n". So a change has happened and therefore we cannot deduce naively from the other Semitic language about the singularity/duality/plurality of (early) Canaanite water. At least we cannot introduce the assumption that historically may*im* was singular - as an established fact.


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## Drink

origumi said:


> The question whether a -ayim form is dual or plural (or something else) cannot be answered by the stress position alone. Historical development can mislead us. Take for example צהריים - dual by your criterion, but apparently neither dual nor plural (see, again, the Mesha Stele).



Again, my use of the word "dual form" only refers to the actual form of the word, and not to its etymological history. I guess it could be that it first took on a plural form before taking on a dual form, but nevertheless, in Tiberian vocalization, it has a dual form, and so does צהריים. Anyway, the Mesha Stele form "הצהרם" is not really strong evidence of anything. The -m/-n endings could have been interchangeable for all we know. We don't have a large enough corpus of Moabite to draw strong conclusions.



origumi said:


> The non-Canaanite Semitic languages have a singular form for water. Canaanite languages have instead something that looks like dual/plural, by adding the "m" or "n". So a change has happened and therefore we cannot deduce naively from the other Semitic language about the singularity/duality/plurality of (early) Canaanite water. At least we cannot introduce the assumption that historically may*im* was singular - as an established fact.



At some point in the past, the dual ending was *_-ay_ and the *_-m_ was the mimation suffix (whose function is not completely clear, but may have been an indefinite marker like in Arabic). The form of "מים" at that time was also probably *_may_. At some point later, the *_-m_ suffix lost its functionality and got stuck onto the non-construct forms of the masculine plural ending (*_-ī_ + *_-m_ = *-_īm_) and the dual ending (*_-ay_ + *_-m_ = *_-aym_). It also got stuck onto the non-construct forms of מים and שמים (*_may_ + *_-m_ = *_maym_; *_šamay_ + *_-m_ = *_šamaym_). It could be that it got stuck onto מים and שמים because they were already analyzed as duals due to their form, or simply because of the same phonological reasons, if the reasons were phonological, in which case they because analyzed as plural/dual later. But *_may_ is the same form that is found in Etheopic languages one of the two possible proto-Arabic forms, thus I have no trouble believing that *_may_ was singular at some point in the pre-history of Hebrew, whether before or after it ended up stuck with *_-m_ suffix. If this was the true chain of events, then that's enough for me to consider the current form to be historically singular.


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## origumi

Dual form is a specific term, words like צהרים, ירושלים, מצרים are not necessarily dual even though they end with -ayim.
(We don't need to discuss each of these, they serve merely as examples of questionable forms).

Our discussion is about the essence of "m" (or "ayim") at the end of the word. You're assuming that the "m" is mimation and then concludes that "mayim" wasn't originally dual/plural. For doing this you'd have to justify the mimation assumption in regard to the Hebrew dual/plural forms, and also to show that the word may*im* existed before -ayim (including the "m") was established as the dual suffix.


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## origumi

rushalaim said:


> Sorry, guys, I really don't understand how _"water"_ could be plural indeed!


See Gesenius (although rather old) §88d. Of the Dual and §124b. The Various Uses of the Plural-form.


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## rushalaim

Drink said:


> Probably not, because the second mem is not part of the root, but is a remnant of mimation, which shows that it was reanalyzed as dual in form well before biblical times. In Arabic the cognate is māʾ, but its plural is a broken plural (miyāh), which is unhelpful to determine the would-be Hebrew plural. However, the similarly structured samāʾ (equivalent to שָׁמַיִם) has the plural samāwāt, which points to a Hebrew would-be plural שְׁמָיוֹת (heavens), which points to מָיוֹת (waters).


_Phoenician_: _sing_. *מוּ* _pl_. *מֻם* and _sing_. *שַׁמוּ* _pl_. *שַׁמֻם*
_Aramaic_: _sing_. *מַיָא* _pl_. *מַיִן* and _sing_. *שְׁמַיָא* _pl_. *שְׁמַיִן
Drink*, do you think _Hebrew_: _sing_. *מַי* _pl_. *מַיִם* and _sing_. *שַׁמַי* _pl_. *שַׁמַיִם* ?


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## Drink

origumi said:


> Dual form is a specific term, words like צהרים, ירושלים, מצרים are not necessarily dual even though they end with -ayim.
> (We don't need to discuss each of these, they serve merely as examples of questionable forms).



_Dual_ is a specific term. _Dual form_ is just a term that I am using to describe the _form_ that the _dual_ takes in Hebrew. צהרים, ירושלים, מצרים have _dual form_ even if they are not _dual_. I think we are just having a semantic misunderstanding.



origumi said:


> Our discussion is about the essence of "m" (or "ayim") at the end of the word. You're assuming that the "m" is mimation and then concludes that "mayim" wasn't originally dual/plural. For doing this you'd have to justify the mimation assumption in regard to the Hebrew dual/plural forms, and also to show that the word may*im* existed before -ayim (including the "m") was established as the dual suffix.



Whether you want to call it mimation or not, I don't care, but the *_-m_ was certainly a suffix, as is clear from the fact that it is absent from the construct state, and this is supported by parallels in other Semitic languages. I don't understand why you want me to justify that _mayim_ existed before _-ayim_ was established as a dual suffix. This may not have been the case, as I have already pointed out in my explanation of the possible historical changes.



rushalaim said:


> _Phoenician_: _sing_. *מוּ* _pl_. *מֻם* and _sing_. *שַׁמוּ* _pl_. *שַׁמֻם*
> _Aramaic_: _sing_. *מַיָא* _pl_. *מַיִן* and _sing_. *שְׁמַיָא* _pl_. *שְׁמַיִן
> Drink*, do you think _Hebrew_: _sing_. *מַי* _pl_. *מַיִם* and _sing_. *שַׁמַי* _pl_. *שַׁמַיִם* ?



As I pointed out, מיא and מין are both plural, מיא is just the emphatic state (you can think of it as having the "definite article" suffix א). Same for phoenician, they were both plural (or both singular), but the forms you show are with and without the -m suffix.


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## rushalaim

*origumi*, *Drink*, *hadronic* thank you all for your help!


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## rushalaim

origumi said:


> Some assume there's a "true" plural form "memot" (long "e") as rushalaim suggested above, but I don't know what's the basis.


_Sing._ *מַי* - _Dual_ *מַיִם* - _Pl._ *מֵימוֹת *(root *מהה*)
_Sing._ *יָד* - _Dual_ *יָדַיִם* - _Pl._ *יָדוֹת *(root *ידה*)
_Sing._ *רֶגֶל* - _Dual_ *רַגְלַיִם* - _Pl._ *רְגָלִים*


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## Drink

rushalaim said:


> _Sing._ *מַי* - _Dual_ *מַיִם* - _Pl._ *מֵימוֹת *(root *מהה*)



This is impossible. If **מַי were the singular, then the dual would be **מַיַּיִם and the plural **מַיּוֹת or **מַיִּים. If מֵימוֹת is the plural, then מַיִם is singular and **מֵימַיִם is dual.


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## rushalaim

Drink said:


> This is impossible. If **מַי were the singular, then the dual would be **מַיַּיִם and the plural **מַיּוֹת or **מַיִּים. If מֵימוֹת is the plural, then מַיִם is singular and **מֵימַיִם is dual.


_Constr._ in Pentateuch is *מֵימֵיהֶם*


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## Drink

rushalaim said:


> _Constr._ in Pentateuch is *מֵימֵיהֶם*



I think you mean מֵימֵי. The הֶם is just a suffixed object pronoun. But anyway, the Bible, including the Torah (Pentateuch), has both מֵימֵי and מֵי as constructs.


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## rushalaim

Drink said:


> I think you mean מֵימֵי. The הֶם is just a suffixed object pronoun. But anyway, the Bible, including the Torah (Pentateuch), has both מֵימֵי and מֵי as constructs.


Plural also has two variants?
_sg._ *מַי* - _pl._ *מֵיּוֹת* - _pl._ *מֵימוֹת*
_sg._ *פֶּה* - _pl._ *פֵּיוֹת* - _pl._ *פִּיפִיּוֹת*


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