אַחִים brother (irregular plural)

[sitifan]

http://quizlet.com/1174096/hebrew-lesson-4-flash-cards/
אַחִים brother (irregular plural)
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Why is the plural "achim/brothers" irregular? It sounds very regular to me.

[Babelfish]

Same here. There are also a couple of typos in the page, so it's probably just a mistake.

[sitifan]

A professor of Christian theology tells me that it is irregular because the vowel under aleph changes from qamets to patach.

[Babelfish]

Ah, that's possible. We Israelis hardly use vocalized text nowadays so we wouldn't notice...

[Hadronic]

That irregularity becomes perceivable in the third person masc singular, where it becomes exav, "his brothers", like other other nouns containing a guttural with invisible dagesh followed by a qamatz gadol : פחם pexam, נהג nehag, טחן texan, שען še'an... from the mishkal qăttāl .

[Mikey93]

It’s not an irregularity though. It follows common phonetic laws.

[Hadronic]

At this rate, nothing is irregular in Hebrew

That said, exav may be considered regular once you know that the Alef has a patach and not a qamatz (even that, it's a rare rule), but the fact that אח (qamatz) takes a patach in the plural can be considered irregular, even more so with that ( invisible) dagesh in the ח and absence of dagesh compensation (תשלום דגש).

[Mikey93]

At this rate, nothing is irregular in Hebrew

?
I do not intend to be splitting hairs here, neither do I claim there is no irregularity whatsoever present in the inflection of the word. Only that I do not see anything unusual in masculine 3th person plural, since ח with Qamets/Ḥatef Qamets is always preceded by Seghol, be it accented or not.

[Hadronic]

Exav is regular, but certainly not usual. I was saying that exav is regular *once* you know that the א in אחים has a patach and that the ח has an invisible dagesh without lengthening compensation. That law though, is *not* a common law, as you called it. So rare and spotty that you could it an irregularity (or something "unusual").

What *seems* irregular though, is that אח, unlike אב, דג or חם (father in law), is that the plural be with patach and invisible dagesh in the first place.

But even that irregularity may not be one : depending on if you assume the root of אח to be א-ו-ח or א-ח-ח, the dagesh plural may make sense in the latter case. (cf. דג דגים with qamatz, because root is דוג, vs תם תמים tammim or דף דפים dappim with patach and dagesh because root is תממ and דפפ resp.).

That's why I'm saying in Hebrew, aside of couple words and nouns (אכל, נתן.. and ימים, בתים), most of the morphology can be explained by a rule, albeit tricky and rare.

"since ח with Qamets/Ḥatef Qamets is always preceded by Seghol, be it accented or not." : well מחר has a qamatz under the ח, but the מ doesn't get a segol.. מחרתיים moxoratayim has a xataf qamatz and no segol under the מ..

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