ܓܬܝܗ gtyh the world of living creatures
MP gētīg [gytyk] the material world; worldly (CPD 36); ManMP gytyg /gētīg/ id. (Durkin-Meisterernst 2004, 170); NP gētī the world (Steingass 1108; Horn 212). — Jud. Aram. gytʾ id. (Shaked 1995, 180). The final letter of the Syr. word gtyh has an overdot, a mark usually employed to distinguish the feminine from the masculine in an otherwise homograph third person object or pronoun suffix. In Persian loanwords, this overdot appears elsewhere on the final h of Persian loanwords containing the suffix -īh, see for instance kṭwwdwtyh (see s.v.): it is highly probable that in Persian loanwords this diacritic mark represents a zero phonic value, namely indicates that h was no longer pronounced, as suggested by Orsatti 2003, 153. As far as the model of Syr. gtyh is concerned, although it might theoretically represent MP gētāh, gētē the material, corporeal world, a learned loanword from Av. gaēθā- world, mankind (Nyberg 82; AirWb 476), the Syr. spelling is more likely due to the confusion between the suffixes -īg and -īh, which is frequent even in good and old MP manuscripts, which arose after -īg and -īh merged into -ī (see Salemann 1895, 279 n. 1; Boyce 1975, 89 n. 7; Josephson 1998, 101) ● am 2, 576, 16 ◆ LS 137b; PS Suppl. 81