The Hebrew Language’s Wildly Unpredictable Gender System

Have you heard about the two Israelis who argued whether this week’s fast day of the Ninth of Av should be called Tisha b’Av or Teysha b’Av? In the end they compromised on August 13.

Of course you haven’t, because I just made it up. Yet such an imaginary anecdote would illustrate something real about Hebrew. This is a feature that confuses many of its native speakers, let alone those who study or acquire it as adults—namely, that while it is a heavily gendered language in which all nouns and their agreeing adjectives (as well as most verbs and some adverbs) are either masculine or feminine, Hebrew numbers come reversed, so that masculine nouns take feminine numbers and feminine nouns take masculine ones. Numerically speaking, it’s an upside-down world.

Let’s be more concrete. The Hebrew suffix –ah (in which the “h” is unpronounced but indicates a stressed syllable) is what most commonly converts a masculine noun or adjective into a feminine one. “Boy,” for example, is yeled, “girl,” yaldah; a big boy is yeled gadol, a big girl, yaldah g’dolah. Logically, therefore, since the masculine form of the Hebrew number “nine” is teysha and the feminine form is tish’ah, and since the Hebrew word for “day,” yom, with its plural of yamim, is masculine, “nine days” should be teysha yamim. (The suffix -im is the regular masculine pluralizer in Hebrew, just as the suffix -ot is the regular feminine pluralizer.) And yet, as we have said, it’s just the opposite: “nine days” is tish’ah yamim, whereas “nine minutes” is teysha dakot, even though dakah, “minute,” is a feminine noun.