Baseball and Hebrew

So for those of you who have access to and can read my Facebook page, you may have noticed that I like baseball.... a lot. (Twins fan for life!) I tend to make analogies that relate back to baseball. (P.S. if you don't know a lot about baseball I am sorry... google the terms? Some examples: I am up to bat, he is on deck, it threw a change-up, etc.)

The one most recently used on my Facebook wall was: "Every time I start to get the pattern it throws a curveball." This was in reply to working on my Hebrew homework and wanting to throw something against a wall (which is not a good recommendation if you have neighbors).

Let me set the situation for you.... We are in Chapter 5 of Seow's A Grammar for Biblical Hebrew, learning about Geminates and Segolates (I do not expect you to know what that means). But, what bothered me was when I previewed the vocabulary for that chapter and we came to the word for father: 'ab (the b is pronounced with a v sound).

When I looked at the definition it named the plural as 'abot (same v pronunciation). The ending -ot is typically a feminine ending... but it was on a masculine word!! WHAT!? Confused to the extreme. I had to bring it up in class and the reason for this is because "That is what the language does!"

I do not blame the professor for that answer... I blame the person who originally made this the rule! I hope it was a woman and that she was thinking "I am going to give it a feminine plural ending because when you get too many men in a group they act girl-y." (No offense to any of the men who are reading this).

But if that wasn't the case I am not happy... Why? Because there are straight explanations (fastballs, makes sense) and there are messed up explanations (curveballs, don't make sense) and that was definitely a curveball!!!