qal

Etymology
A suppletive formation: The third-person forms of the perfect are from ; all other forms are from.

The use of the latter verb in the imperfect tense is somewhat understandable, because one will more often mention the fact that someone says something repeatedly or generally, rather than that they are saying something right now (though, of course, the imperfect is also used for the future). More surprising is perhaps that also conquered the first and second persons of the perfect. This, in turn, could be due to a parallelism with other verbs with a long stem vowel (“hollow roots”), where these forms are phonetically closer to the imperfect than to the third person (cf., , , or , , ).

Verb

 * 1) to say; to tell

Noun

 * 1) water
 * 2) river

Alternative forms

 * qalʼ