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Hebrew Helps: 30-33
© 2010, T. Michael W. Halcomb

Help 30: Now that we have examined the basics of gutturals, it shall prove advantageous
to consider Segholates. In the next Help, we will consider how gutturals and segholates
interact with one another.
In Short, segholates in Hebrew are nouns that are formed with two seghols or a
seghol in the second position as their vowels and accented on the first syllable, for
example:
or

Help 31: Segholates show a handful of tendencies:

1) Some segholates have a singular form but no plural form

2) With segholates the accent falls on the first syllable not the last (as is typical in
Hebrew)
3) If the 2nd or 3rd consonant is a guttural, then the second syllable will usually retain
the seghol. However, in some cases it may become a patah.
4) With plural endings, the segholates all go to the same form: The first vowel goes
to a shewa (or patah shewa if the consonant cannot take a shewa) and the second
to a qamets

Help 32: Geminates are essentially doubled consonants (e.g. mm, nn, ss, etc.). In
Hebrew, when we say that a word is a geminate, we are saying that its 2nd and 3rd
consonants are the same (e.g. doubled). However, it is important to note that the doubled
form only occurs or shows up when the plural suffix / ending is added.

Help 33: Having discussed geminates, we need to know that when the final consonant of
a word is doubled and it is a guttural or resh, the result is often the lengthening of the
preceding vowel.