13.4 Preformatives and Sufformatives

Preformatives and Sufformatives are unique verbal beginnings and endings that indicate person, gender, and number

• In Lesson 12, we introduced the concept of preformatives and sufformatives
• The Perfect has a set of “perfect sufformatives”
  • Only the 3ms does not have a perfect sufformative
  • We will learn the sufformatives for the remaining PGN forms in the next section
• The perfect sufformatives are the same across all verb stems, so what you learn for the Qal can be applied to the derived stems (good news!)
• The perfect does not have preformatives (more good news!)

A verb with no preformative, and a perfect sufformative will be diagnostic of a Perfect conjugation