4.2 Gender and Number

  • All Hebrew nouns have Gender and Number
  • Grammatical Gender
    • The “gender” sometimes does, but usually does not have anything to do with biological gender
    • סֵ֫פֶר is masculine (M), while תּוֹרָה is feminine (F). There is nothing inherently masculine about books, nor is there anything feminine about laws or instructions
    • The gender of a noun never changes
  • Number
    • A noun is either singular (S), plural (P), or less frequently, dual (D)
      • Dual is precisely two of something
      • Apart from the words “pair” or “both”, English doesn’t have too many dual forms
      • In Hebrew, typically paired body parts are in the dual form (eyes, ears)57
    • The number of a noun CAN change
  • A word’s ending can indicate both the NUMBER and the GENDER - we will learn the endings later in this lesson

Person

  • In Lesson 8, (Pronouns) we will introduce the concept of “person”
  • Collectively, when you see “PGN” in grammar, this refers to “person, gender, and number”; e.g., “3MS” means “3rd person, masculine, singular”.

  1. Only a limited number of words are dual. Just because there may only be two of something does not necessarily mean we use the dual form.↩︎