ABSTRACT
This chapter is about the psychological aspects of reading Hebrew words, with a focus on word morphology. Most Hebrew words are complex, in the sense of being composed of sublexical elements (morphemes). We noted in earlier chapters that all verbs and most nouns have roots, generally consisting of three consonants, which are embedded in a pattern. The pattern consists of the vowels by which the root consonants are articulated and potentially flanked by initial and/or terminal phonemes, which may or may not be considered affixes. Linear affixation also plays a role in both inflections and derivations. Affixes are attached to the word’s base, a free morpheme, and a word in its own right (e.g., perax ‘flower’, erec ‘country’), or to the word’s stem, which is the form of the base in inflected or derived words, e.g., praxim ‘flowers’ arac-ot ‘countries’. (Stem letters are marked with bold letters.) The stem as defined here often differs from the base, mostly in its vocal pattern as in the examples above.
