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- Topic: Hebrew >
- "חולצתי רטובה."
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So is this a generally applicable rule for possessives? Adding a ת as a binding consonant when the word ends on a vowel?
The ה turns into ת for female objects (חולצה - חולצתי) but is omitted for male (עלה - עלי)
The א is sometimes omitted (אבא - אבי) but not always (כסא - כסאי).
A וֹ (kholam) would add an א, while a ו (vav) would act like other consonants.
A י would act like any consonant.
Why isn’t this “my wet shirt”? Isn’t “my shirt is wet, חולצתי היא רטובה ?
My wet shirt would be חולצתי הרטובה. You can think of חולצתי as החולצה שלי: just as with החולצה שלי, when adding an adjective it must be definite (come with 'ה as a prefix).
When adding an adjective to a noun, if the noun must become definite, why was “shirt“ not definite in your first sentence? Okay, here’s my day-later edit to my comment. I would delete this comment, but others have kindly answered my misperception, so in order for their answers to make sense in the thread...radagast said that “when adding an adjective it must become definite” and of course I should have understood that meant “when adding an adjective, the adjective must definite”. However, I misunderstood him to mean “When adding an adjective, the noun must become definite.”
Second misunderstanding: I thought חולצתי was not definite b/c it had no -ה in front of it, but as YardenNB helpfully pointed out, a definite noun is not always preceded by -ה. So I finally realized that חולצתי is definite!
It is definite; the possessive suffix itself denotes definiteness. Like radagast said, חולצתי is equivalent to החולצה שלי.
The adjective רָטֹב has also the variant feminine form רְטֻבָּה [rtuba] with a plosive /b/.
In short, no - people don't talk like this. But the possessive suffix is very common in writing and formal speech.
