21st Century Bible Hebrew -- plural nouns

Genesis 1:14

יד וַיֹּאמֶר אֱלֹהִים יְהִי מְאֹרֹת בִּרְקִיעַ הַשָּׁמַיִם לְהַבְדִּיל בֵּין הַיּוֹם וּבֵין הַלָּיְלָה וְהָיוּ לְאֹתֹת וּלְמוֹעֲדִים וּלְיָמִים וְשָׁנִים:

Transliteration: Va-yomer elohim y’hi m’orot birqia ha-shamaim l’havdil beyn ha-yom u-veyn ha-laylah v’hayu l’otot ul’moadim ul’yamim v’shanim.

Translation:     Gd said let there be lights in the raqia of the heaven for separating between day and night; from now on they are for the purpose of signs and warnings and days and years.

Letters in this lesson:

Vocabulary in this lesson:

מְאֹרֹת	lights
אֹתֹת	signs
מוֹעֲדִים	warnings
שָׁנִים	years

So far, I’ve addressed gender in verbs. Lesson 12 on construct state also shows the indefinite of both singular and plural, masculine and feminine nouns.

The plural endings for those also are the plural endings for adjectives. As with most other languages that have such distinctions, the gender and number of nouns and the adjectives that modify them have to agree.

How do you know the gender of nouns in BH? Well, natural gender applies. Things that are masculine have masculine gender and things that are feminine have feminine gender.

Aside from that, most verbs ending in a consonant other than heh are masculine; the name Yehudah falls under the natural gender case.

Nouns that end in qamats plus heh tend to be feminine.

Nouns that end in patach plus chet tend to be feminine in grammatical gender, but they may be masculine in natural gender if they are masculine names.  Noach and Shelach are two examples.

Erets and nefesh have feminine grammatical gender; you’ll notice it when they are used with verbs and adjectives.

Some nouns take either gender and sometimes the meaning changes. Yad means “hand” when it is masculine; it means “support, financial means” when it is feminine.

There are some irregular nouns: daughter is bat and the plural is banot, the construct is b’nat; house is bait, the construct is bet and the construct plural is batey.

I won’t give a list of nouns like this. Harkavy’s dictionary is online free and it shows gender. Download it and place bookmarks for the start of the sections to make it easier to look things up.

Just realize that BH is a lot easier on this subject than Arabic.  You must learn the plural of Arabic nouns with each and every noun, because most of them don’t have the endings in BH, which are called “external plurals”.  A number of Arabic nouns have “internal plurals” of which there are five classes, but a lot of them have “broken plurals” which cannot be predicted.  Count your blessings.

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights Reserved