Hebrew Gender Part 2


The stumbling block of Hebrew, the Shibboleth (please excuse the racist reference from Judges Chapter 12), that separates those who know, from those that don't - is of course gender. All Hebrew nouns and verbs have gender. The number, adjective and verb associated with the noun must take on the gender of the noun. There are lots of confusing twists and turns. In a previous posting I gave you 5 simple rules for choosing gender in Hebrew - OK sort of simple rules, well maybe actually quite complicated. (If you know those rules you will catch the glaring error at bostonlanguage.wordpress.com/2015/01/09/gender-in-languages-across-the-world.)

Let's do some gender studies.

Lots of attempts have been made to make some sense of masculine and feminine in Hebrew but the rules are really quite irrational. Why should breastsשדיים  and hips מותניים, such obviously feminine body parts, take a masculine gender whereas so many other body parts are feminine? Why do mothers and mistresses and she-asses have masculine looking words? Confused? Frustrated? Don't read any more, it just gets worse.

People have noted the צדק versus צדקה contrast ie that the Jewish Biblical concept is that they are masculine and feminine versions of the same thing, צדקה  meaning social justice as opposed to צדק legal justice. This is a nice idea but I have not found any more examples of this (love to hear if you do). פרש and פרשה, horseman and episode, or, מניע and מניעה, motivation and prevention,נמל  and נמלה port and ant – are completely not masculine and feminine versions of the same thing. Even stranger there are words that have two totally different meanings depending on whether they are masculine or feminine: אות is signal and letter, עצם is one or item, respectively feminine and masculine.

Maybe, just maybe, we can sort things out a little?

Countries and towns, without exception, are all feminine perhaps because they are the mothers or protectors of their citizens (think מולדת mother land). Gesenius Kautzsch Cowley (in "Hebrew Grammar")  (page 389) gives a better rule. Nouns which denote "circumscribed space" country, world, hell, (town) square, city, state, well, are all feminine ארץ, תבל, שאול, ככר, עיר, מדינה, באר. Also דרך way or trek חצר  courtyard . Is it because they are receptacles of objects or people (nudge nudge wink wink )?

Feminine words usually take the -ות plural and masculine words the-ים  plural but there are too many exceptions to this to make it a useful guideline (חלונות (windows) and אבות    (fathers) are masculine words with feminine plurals and פעמים (occurrences) and אבנים (stones) are feminine words with masculine endings. This is a common mistake amongst Israeli children but they always work it out at a later age.

There seems to be no connection with the meaning of the word and its gender. Masculine (= harsh, tough) things like bricks (לבנים) or swordsחרבות) ) are feminine; and female (= pretty, soft) things like smile  (חיוך) and beauty (יופי) are masculine! But, strong and courageous animals are usually masculine – דוב, זאב, כלב bear, wolf, dog – and weak and small animals are often feminine even when they are actually masculine – ארנבת, יונה, חסידה, דבורה, נמלה rabbit, dove, stork, bee, ant – but I wouldn't call the giraffe גירפה  a weak or small animal.

Sorry the best we can do is the five difficult to remember, not so logical, rules from my previous post hebrew100words/hebrew-gender-part-1.

saul davis