Segolates are words in the
Hebrew language whose end is of the form CVCVC, where the
penultimate vowel receives
syllable stress
In linguistics, and particularly phonology, stress or accent is the relative emphasis or prominence given to a certain syllable in a word or to a certain word in a phrase or sentence. That emphasis is typically caused by such properties as i ...
. Such words are called "segolates" because the final unstressed vowel is typically (but not always) ''
segol''. These words evolved from older
Semitic
Semitic most commonly refers to the Semitic languages, a name used since the 1770s to refer to the language family currently present in West Asia, North and East Africa, and Malta.
Semitic may also refer to:
Religions
* Abrahamic religions
** ...
words that ended in a complex
coda
Coda or CODA may refer to:
Arts, entertainment, and media Films
* Movie coda, a post-credits scene
* ''Coda'' (1987 film), an Australian horror film about a serial killer, made for television
*''Coda'', a 2017 American experimental film from Na ...
; 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 rather than a segol, due to the influence of guttural consonants (, , , ) in the final syllable.
Classical Arabic
Classical Arabic ( ar, links=no, ٱلْعَرَبِيَّةُ ٱلْفُصْحَىٰ, al-ʿarabīyah al-fuṣḥā) or Quranic Arabic is the standardized literary form of Arabic used from the 7th century and throughout the Middle Ages, most notab ...
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 vowel between the final two consonants, similar to what happened in Hebrew.)
Hebrew language
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