As we turn now to focus on nouns, I am pleased to point out that we are not starting from square one. We have yet to talk about the grammar of nouns, but we have had many nouns within our vocabulary words. In fact, you already know 27 nouns!
A noun is a person, place, thing, or idea. In Hebrew, nouns have two main grammatical details—gender and number. This is, of course, different than English, which does not give nouns a grammatical gender. But the concept is not hard to understand.
A noun like אִישׁ (“man”) naturally has a gender of masculine whereas the noun אִשָּׁה (“woman”) is predictably feminine. However, in Hebrew, all words have a gender, not only those with a masculine or feminine nature. So, for example, עִיר (“city”) is feminine. This grammatical gender in no way suggests masculine or feminine qualities in the meaning of the word (cities do not thereby possess femininity), but is simply a grammatical dynamic in Hebrew. The importance of grammatical gender in nouns is found in the reality that this gender aids us in identifying which verbs and adjectives in the sentence connect to this noun.
Form
Feminine nouns generally end with an a-class vowel + ה, or with a ת. Nouns without either of these features are typically masculine. (For words in your vocab that do not follow these rules, we will explicitly indicate their gender.)
Whereas English (almost) always makes a noun plural by adding an ‘s,’ Hebrew uses two different endings to designate a noun as plural. Masculine nouns are typically made plural with the ים ending, whereas feminine nouns typically take the וֹת plural ending, which replaces the final ה or ת. (Again, exceptions to this will be explicitly indicated in your vocab.)
nouns
singular & plural forms
| masculine |
מֶלֶךְ |
מְלָכִים |
king / kings |
| feminine |
מִשְׁפָּחָה |
מִשְׁפְּחוֹת |
family / families |
Dual
But Hebrew actually has three options for its grammatical number—singular, plural, and dual. Singular and plural work the same as they do in English, but dual is new. The grammatical number of dual is used for a specific selection of nouns which naturally come in pairs. We find this often with body parts (a pair of legs, hands, ears, horns, etc), words of time (2 days, 2 weeks, 2 months, etc), and words of counting (two, two hundred, two thousand, 2 times, etc).
The ending for a noun with a grammatical number of dual is similar to the masculine plural ending, but with a patach vowel under the preceding letter (which, you will recall, creates the same sound as the English word “eye”). This is the dual ending irrespective of what happens to be the normal plural ending for this noun. For example, מֵאָה is “one hundred,” מֵאוֹת is “hundreds,” but מָאתַיִם is “two hundred.” (Note that whenever a word that ends in an a-class vowel + ה receives some sort of ending or suffix, the ה will either drop out or change to a ת.)
nouns
singular & dual forms
| feminine |
רֶגֶל |
רַגְלַיִם |
leg / pair of legs |
| masculine |
יוֹם |
יֹמַיִם |
day / two days |
| feminine |
מֵאָה |
מָאתַיִם |
one hundred / two hundred |
Use the following quizlet to help you see how well you can parse nouns from your vocabulary. Check the options to make sure it is set to answer with English. Then try to give the definition, gender, and number before flipping each card. (Watch out: some of them are irregular!)