Talk:Hebrew/Intro to Verbs

Untitled
Shouldn't the fourth binyan, Reflexive, be "to eat him/herself" instead of "to be digested" if it's the verb "to eat" applied on the subject, by the subject? 84.50.168.227 00:42, 21 April 2006 (UTC)
 * This system of verb templates has many inconsistencies, particularly in the template-to-meaning correspondence. Therefore, "hit'akkel" (הִתְאַכֵּל) does not mean "he ate himself" or "it ate itself" as expected, but rather "it was digested". BTW, in this case the spelling הִתְעַכֵּל with Ayin is much more popular. 88.155.194.120 21:04, 25 August 2006 (UTC)

Gramer mistakes
As a native Hebrew speeker, I feel obligated to inform you that there are many mistakes in this article. the main one is that the writer chose to demanstrate benianym in this way: to eat= pa'al פעל, which is wrong. in Hebrew, a word only has a binyan if it has זמן וגוף. to eat, However would be translated to לאכול which is a שם פעולה mining that it has no binyan. sorry for the bad explation.

Comments
This article could use a lot of improvement.

a) Binyanim are word formation rules. Except for Pual and Hufal, a verb's binyan provides useful hints as to what a word might mean, but it does not determine it.  Pual is always the passive of Piel with the same root.  Hufal is always the passive of Hifil with the same root.  Otherwise you really need to look the word up in the dictionary.  You can't use the buinyan to guess the meaning any more than you can redict that the verb "nationalize" in "France nationalized the airline industry" means that the government is taking over ownership and management of the airline industry from private owners.  For that you need a dictionary and maybe a history lesson.

More often than not the word is only loosely related to the core idea of it root. There is no particular reason why the Pa-al of the root פתח means "to physically open something" but "the piel means to develop something". Or another example: the Paal of יצא means to physically go out from a location but the Piel means to commercially export a product.

Personally, I question the wisdom of making binyanim your starting point. The drivers of verb inflection are rules for adding suffixes and prefixes that cut across all binyanim. All binyanim follow the same rules. Most of these rules are purely phonetic. The few that are not have to do with properties that are shared across many binyanim, e.g. whether or not the first letter counts as a prefix letter or part of the root.

Binyanim don't help all that much in generating the principal parts of a verb either, that is, the uninflected stems. Most of the rules that govern the inflection have to do with verbal features that cut across binyanim. For example, any verb that has an מ prefix in the present, makes its future by replacing the מ with the future prefix letter. That rule applies simultaneously to hifil, hufal, piel, pual, and hitpael. Memorizing one rule is a lot easier than learning five identical rules one for each binyan. Even though the rules are identical the student doesn't know why. Since they don't know why they think they have to memorize the rule five times rather than just check for an מ on the present that either is dropped or changes the ה in the past.

b) Verbs with weak letters. The only letters that ever get dropped from verb roots are ל י נ ה ו and in some cases the third root letter when the last two root letters are the same.  The gutterals you list are classified as weak letters due to a slew of vowel changes that need to take place to account for the the special phonetic qualities of gutterals.  The letters אעח never drop out (unless you include Mishnaic Hebrew's sometimes treatment of final א as final ה ) 84.229.127.135 (discuss) 15:56, 20 June 2012 (UTC)