12.5 Person, Gender, Number

The inflected person, gender, and number refer to the subject of the verb94

  • Person, Gender, and Number for verbs are the same as for nouns
  • Gender
    • Male, female, or common
    • “Common” gender is for verb forms that could be either M or F; In Hebrew, as in English, the words for “I” and “we” are Common (i.e., there is not a masculine form of “I” and a separate feminine form of “I”)
  • Person
    • 1st person is the speaker - “I/we sat”
    • 2nd person is the person being spoken to - “you sat”
    • 3rd person is anyone (or any_thing_) else - “he/she/it/they sat”
  • Number is either singular or plural - there are no dual verb forms

When parsing, it is standard to use parsing code “3ms” to mean “third person, masculine, singular.”


  1. There is one exception. Pronominal suffixes are used to denote the object of the verb. We will study these in Lesson 19↩︎