When you start learning Hebrew, one of the first things you discover is that, unlike English, it is a gendered language. This is immediately apparent from the different masculine/feminine verb charts that you memorize. What takes longer to grasp is the world of Hebrew’s nouns, a world where there is no such thing as neutrality.
Every single Hebrew noun is designated as either “male” or “female.” One can attempt to guess at a word’s gender by considering its meaning, but such attempts will often lead one astray. For example, a basic rule that you learn is that body parts that come in pairs are “feminine” (i.e., ears, eyes, arms, legs). With exceptions of course. On the other hand, guessing at the plural endings for gendered nouns may produce better results (your guess would be an “eem” suffix for the masculine plural and an “ot” suffix for the feminine plural), though here too you will be regularly mistaken. For example: “shaneem” (masculine ending) is the plural for the feminine noun “year” and “chalonot” (feminine ending) is the plural for the male noun “window.”
To speak proper Hebrew, you have to master the following concerning gendered nouns: All verbs as well as adjectives assigned to a noun must also receive gendered prefixes and/or suffixes. For example, “door” (delet) in Hebrew is feminine, and if you want to speak about it as closing you will have to use the female conjugated “nisgeret” rather than the male “nisgar”; if you want to speak about it as old, you will have to say that it is “yashan” rather than “yishana.”
Things get even more complicated when you have elements in the same sentence of different genders. If I’m speaking with a man, my brain is thinking “Use the masculine, use the masculine”; but what if the object in the sentence is feminine? What if I ask the man: “Do you want your black umbrella?” In this case, since “umbrella” is feminine, I have to use the feminine conjugation for “black.” So while on the outside I’m trying to have a normal conversation, on the inside I am frantically trying to both find the object in each sentence and take a decent stab at its gender.
An absurd aspect of Hebrew’s gendered nouns is that even “human being” is gendered. Yes “ben Adam” (literally, son of Adam/man) is masculine. Thus, a woman who wants to say of herself “I am a human being who enjoys the quiet” has to use the masculine for “enjoys.” I have suggested that women use “bat Hava” (daughter of Eve) for “human being” in the feminine, but so far this has not caught on. In case you’re wondering: Men face similar (though much less frequent) challenges. For example, the Hebrew word for “character” (or “figure”)— “dmoot”—is feminine, and so the word will take feminine conjugation even if the “character” in question is male, as in: “He was a much beloved [feminine conjugation] public figure.”
The truth of the matter is that most Israelis make the occasional male/female conjugation mistake. Even talented writers, like my friend and teacher Rabbi Lior Engelman, can be caught wondering: male or female? Rabbi Lior, for example, has a daily short podcast on the Torah portion of the week, and on one occasion the Hebrew word “oht” gave him pause. “Oht,” like several other exceptional nouns in Hebrew, has one set of meanings in the feminine form and another set of meanings in the masculine form; in the feminine “oht” means “letter” (in an alphabet, in print), but it takes the male form when meaning “mark” or “sign.”
I try especially hard to use the correct male/female conjugations because of my heavily accented Hebrew. I imagine to myself that my occasional mistakes cannot be just shrugged off and that people will think that I am an ignoramus. There are those native Israelis—especially younger ones—who are not nearly as careful with their gendered conjugations, and this is particularly true concerning numbers. Israeli youth often cannot be bothered to go for the extra syllable that typifies male numbers, and they will use female conjugation for obviously masculine words like “book” or “day” (e.g., “two” in the feminine is the one-syllable word “shtay” but you need to double your syllables for the masculine “shnayim”).
I love the Hebrew language and I even like the challenge of trying to match a noun to its proper gender. I have to admit, though, that every now and then I do get frustrated and think: Why, oh why, can’t a table ever be just a table? Why does it have to be a male table-— with a feminine plural ending, to boot?
