Endnote 2 – Queries & Comments

Semitic nouns have two genders: masculine (which does not have any special morphological feature) and feminine (which regularly had a suffixed -t. Cf. Moscati, et al, An Introduction to the Comparative Grammar of the Semitic Languages (Weisbaden Harrassowitz, 1964), p. 84, §12.32. For example, the Akkadian word for “king” is sharru, with which compare Hebrew sar, “prince,” “officer,” whereas the Akkadian word for “queen” is sharratu, with which compare the name Sarah, meaning “princess.”, Hebrew was one of the first dialects to drop the -t that was the feminine ending, sometime between 1000 and 800 B.C.E. according to Harris.