[Mesorah] Comment on noun patterns in Hebrew

[Mandel, Seth]

One of the main problems in educating people about language is that anyone who speaks a language or understands it well thinks he understands how it works. That is demonstrably not true: if you hire a native speaker to teach non-native speakers, known technically as TOEFL (“Teaching of English as a Foreign Language”), he usually cannot explain things to them.

One of the misunderstandings that laymen hold is that language is a collection of words with meaning.  As it became evident, one can teach chimpanzees and other animals to use words.  Their vocal cords are not set up to pronounce them, but if you give them shapes and colors, they can learn to associate the shape with the sound that a person makes and with its meaning.

It should have been obvious to anyone who looked carefully that animals use various signals to communicate.  Birds, whales, dophins, bees and some other creatures use various signs and sounds to convey messages, such as the location of food and danger.

But that is not human language.  As Betrand Russell famously said,  “No matter how eloquently a dog may bark, he cannot tell you that his parents were poor, but honest.”  The linguistic point is that people use language differently than animals, to convey different sort of information.  But this is equally true about a facet of human language that is distinctive: ALL human languages are built on patterns. You may call these patterns “grammar,” but “a rose by any other name” etc,: ALL human languages employ patterns as part of the language.  The pattern may be the order of words, or intonation, or the specific form of some words, and it can and does change the meaning that is conveyed.  Most people are aware that written language cannot clearly convey such crucial information as whether something is said sarcastically or in jest.  In English, there is a specific intonation used for sentences said as a question or sarcastically, and that intonation is a pattern that can be used for completely different thoughts.

Some of the patterns of language may be called “rules of grammar.” That is just using other words to refer to the fact that language uses patterns to express things: some languages use prefixes or suffixes to verbs and nouns to show the meaning of a word in a sentence, others use separate words or “helping verbs.”  Modeern English uses the order of words to show which is the subject and which is the object. But Old English and Latin and Greek used noun declensions, and so they could put the words in any order they wished.

Some Semitic languages (Akkadian, Ugaritic, Classical Arabic and some others) used noun declensions. But not Hebrew, Aramaic, Ethiopian, or spoken Arabic.

But something that  was alive and well in Biblical and Chazal Hebrew (but not Modern Hebrew) are certain noun patterns that show a divergence in plural suffixes and gender from what is “standard” (or at least what is taught as standard in schools and grammars).

Specifically, people are taught erroneously that Hebrew uses two genders, masculine and feminine. The truth is that Hebrew uses two noun classes, which in many cases correspond to gender.  But noun classes are quite different.  In languages where they were active (such as in Old English or German) there were three noun classes, commonly called “masculine, feminine and neuter.”  But look at the German word mädchen (“girl, maiden,” cognate to theYiddish meidel).  The word is neuter, and one must say “das mãdchen” and “die mãdchen” is not possible).  The poinmt being is that nouns are assigned to one of the three classes, and the class does not correspond to gender. Bantu languages use 7-12 noun classes.  Any adjectives of a noun in one class must agree with it in the form used.  To say in Swahili “the large book” would be kitabu ki.kubwa; “the large books” would be vitabu vikubwa; “the large man” would be mtu mkubwa; “the large men” would be watu wakubwa;” “the “large girl” would be msichana mkubwa, “ the large girls” would be wasichana wakubwa.  Different grammars will disagree about how many different classes there are (some count 7, others 10, others 15), but they do not disagree about the forms.  And what is called by most “Class I” is used for most people, and it does not distinguish by gender (i.e. the forms are the same whether they are masculine or feminine).

[BTW, a little off-topic, that is the reason why the words “god” or “God” in English use the pronoun “he.” It is NOT because the words are masculine in gender, but because they belong to Noun Class I, just as a ship is referred to in older English as “she,” not because ships had anything to do with the feminine gender.  Most people do not understand this, and so many women think that it is sexist to refer to God as “he.”]

Back to noun classes in Hebrew: in Hebrew school I was taught that some nouns were “masculine”: (no ending; plural formed with the endng -im; adjectives and verbs had to agree by using the “masculine” form.) Others were “feminine”: ending -ah or -t; plural -ot, adjectives and verbs use the “feminine” form.  There were a couple of “feminine” nouns with no ending, such as “‘ir, city, but less than ten.  There were some masculine nouns that formed the plural using -ot (such as m’qomot”) but otherwise were masculine (“m’qomot g’dolim”). But linguistically, I would say there are two noun classes in Hebrew.

But there is another noun class very well attested in both Biblical and Chazal Hebrew.  It includes mostly words referring to things that come in bunches or groups.  All grains and many vegetables belong to this class: חטה אחת גדולה, חטים רבות גדולות.
שעורה אחת גדולה, שעורים רבות גדולות.
ביצה אחת גדולה, ביצים רבות גדולות.
קישות אחת גדולה, קישואים רבות גדולות.
That is indeed the form of the word in Chazal, as in Kil’ayim 1:2:
 הקישות והמלפפון אינן כלאיים זה בזה

What gets interesting are the other words that are in this class:
מלה אחת גדולה, מלים רבות גדולות. and
שנה אחת גדולה, שנים רבות גדולות.

The former is understandable when you think about it: people do not normally speak just one word.  But a year?

And then you look further and you see: in 143 cases in the T’NaKh, the word שנים appears, and an additional 25 in s’mikhut and 5 other cases with pronominal suffixes.  But the form שנות also appears 9 times, and with suffixes (such as in Ps. 102:28: וְאַתָּה־ה֑וּא וּ֝שְׁנוֹתֶ֗יךָ לֹ֣א יִתָּֽמּוּ ) another 11.  In all the former cases, it appears in contices such as “he was 86 years old,” “the years of Sarah’s life,”or “in the 18th year of Y’hoshafat.” These contices do not appear with the latter form.  Instead, the latter form refers mostly to ages or periods, as in Ps. 90:15:
שַׂ֭מְּחֵנוּ כִּימ֣וֹת עִנִּיתָ֑נוּ שְׁ֝נ֗וֹת רָאִ֥ינוּ רָעָֽה.

So generally speaking, shanim refers to 12-month years, and shanot refers to periods.  As always, there are cases where one can quibble about which is appropriate, but the general picture is clear. (And, I would argue that is the reason the form “y’mot” rather than the normal “yamim” is used in the pasuq cited: under the influence of the difference in meaning between shanim and shanot T’hillim uses a form of yom with the -ot ending to emphasize that it also refers to a period, not to “days.”)

This pattern of nouns still exists in the time of Chazal.  There is a well-known word that Chazal use meaning “drop”: טפה. For example, in Avot 2:10,
רבי אליעזר בן הורקנוס, בור סיד שאינו מאבד טיפה
Or in the well known quotation from R Zeira mentioned in the “G’moro:
אמר רבּי זירא בנות ישראל הן החמירו על עצמן שאפילּו רואות דם טיפּה כחרדל יושבות עליה שבעת ימים נקיים.
But the plural? See Bava Batra 5:8: וחייב להטיף שלוש טיפין
or in Shir ha Shirim Rabba 1:2:8:;  ומה מים יורדין טפין טפין ןמעשות נחלים נחלים

Again, something that normally comes in groups or bunches follows this pattern. And even when it is in the plural with the “masculine” pplural ending, it is feminine, and the adjectives and verbs must use the feminine form.

Rabbi Dr. Seth Mandel


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