The Ninth Principle: On the elucidation of the class of roots quiescent in the final letter aleph, such as qara.

1. The Pattern Qal Throughout, it comes with a quiescent aleph and a qamats before it, except in the third-person plural and feminine, where the aleph is mobile, as in qar’u, qar’ah. And in the participle and the passive, the aleph is quiescent only in the singular; in the other forms it is mobile, as in qore, qor’im, [qaru, qeru’im], and so on.

The Infinitive qera; and with the prefixed letters b-k-l-m: be-qera, ke-qera, le-qera, mi-qra. And it sometimes comes with an added tav, following the manner of roots quiescent in the final letter he, as I will explain in the next principle, as in le-vilti qerot lanu (Judges 8:1), and le-fi melot le-Bavel (Jeremiah 29:10).

2. And likewise, this class is interchanged in many places with roots quiescent in the final letter he; and I have no need to elaborate further.

The Imperative qera, with the aleph quiescent; but in the other forms it is mobile, as in qer’u, qer’i, qer’na. And it also comes with the loss of the he, as in qer’an lo va-yokhal laḥem (Exodus 2:20); and the aleph is quiescent in the word qer’an li Mara (Ruth 1:20).

3. And the letters e-i-t-n are vocalized as in the strong roots, and the aleph is quiescent when it stands at the end of the word, as in eqra, yiqra, and so on. But when another letter follows it, it is mobile, as in yiqre’u, tiqre’u, tiqre’i. Yet in the feminine plural it is quiescent, as in tiqre’na milḥamah (Exodus 1:10).

4. And all the other patterns proceed in this same manner, except that in them a tsere most often appears before the quiescent aleph in the past tense, when it occurs, and likewise in the first-person forms, as in niqre’ta, niqre’ti, malle’ta, malle’ti, himtza’ta, himtza’ti. And I have already written to you that many roots quiescent in the first letter aleph come according to the pattern with a tsere, and all of them are intransitive verbs, such as male, sane, yare, and the like; see there.