The Emergence of The Masculine Plural Construct Morpheme in Modern Hebrew

In written Hebrew, the final tsere plene as in 'sons of' is the graphemic masculine plural construct marker, but throughout the history of Hebrew until the pre-revival period, this morphogram has had no specific linguistic counterpart. This is valid not only for the morphophonology of Classical Hebrew but also for all non-vernacular communitarian Hebrew orthoepies (reading traditions) throughout the Jewish diaspora. In D. Bolinger's terms, the final graphemic unit is a visual morpheme. With the advent of spoken Hebrew, however, the Ashkenazi dictum "tsere alef → ey," though unfit vis-à-vis Sephardic ideal Hebrew, was maintained in colloquial Hebrew in instances of open syllable tsere plene, whence the final morpheme +ey as in /bney/ (Sephardic /bene/). This new colloquial Hebrew morpheme has originated ex scripto.