Although Hebrew is a Semitic language and very different in origin from Indo-European tongues, it has some features that look strikingly familiar compared with other languages.
Hebrew not only has the same concept of the infinitive, but it is even formed in the same way as in English: by adding the particle to/ל־ at the front. Just as English uses to + eat Hebrew uses ל + אכול (le’echol – to eat).
In Modern Hebrew, the verb form without ל־ (the infinitive absolute) still exists, but it is rarely used.
Hebrew and Russian verb conjugations are usually complex, with special forms for person and number and in Hebrew also for gender – Hebrew future tense has 10 conjugation forms.
Surprisingly, present tense in Hebrew and past tense in Russian are much simpler, having just 4 conjugation forms and are built using the same technique.
In both cases, these tenses are not true verb conjugations but are expressed using participial forms (verbal adjectives) in Hebrew and archaic participles in Russian, both agreeing with the subject in gender and number only and not in person.
In this example the actual meaning is reading like “the reading person” in Modern Hebrew and one who had read in archaic Russian.
Although German has no such system like Hebrew binyanim, it possesses a small set of common verbs that also shift meaning through vowel alternation. Some of these pairs are transitive–intransitive (state vs. cause), others show shifted but related meanings, like in Hebrew:
In both Biblical Hebrew and Italian, a short object pronoun can be joined directly to a verb, so that the verb and the object become one word.
For example, in the Hebrew blessing:
אֲשֶׁר קִדְּשָׁנוּ בְּמִצְוֹתָיו
asher kiddeshanu bemitzvotav
“who sanctified us with his commandments”
the word קִדְּשָׁנוּ contains both the verb “sanctified” and the object “us”:
קִדֵּשׁ + נוּ → קִדְּשָׁנוּ
sanctified + us → sanctified us
Italian forms words in a very similar way:
In both languages, instead of placing the pronoun as a separate word, it is attached to the verb. The result is a single word that expresses both the action and the person or thing affected by it.
This form is common in Biblical Hebrew, in Modern Hebrew, the object is usually expressed as a separate word:
קִדֵּשׁ אוֹתָנוּ – he sanctified us
The English expression I like him follows the standard pattern: the one who likes (I) is the subject. Surprisingly, in Hebrew, Italian, German, and Russian, the construction is reversed: the liked person is the subject, and the one who likes is expressed indirectly:
The letter ט (Tet) is one of the less commonly used letters in Hebrew, but interestingly, many words related to water and purity include this letter. While it may just be a coincidence, it’s a fun pattern to notice. I once heard a Hebrew teacher referring to ט as “a wet letter” 💧.
| Hebrew | Meaning |
|---|---|
| טוֹב | good |
| טֶבַע | nature |
| טָרִי | fresh |
| טָעִים | tasty |
| טַל | dew |
| טיפה | drop |
| טָהוֹר | pure |
| רָטוֹב | wet |
| מָטָר | rain, shower |
| טִפְטוּף | slow water drops |
| לְשַׁייֵּט | to sail |
| לִשְׁטוֹף | to wash, rinse |
| לְהַטְבִּיעַ | to drown, sink |
A curious pattern in Hebrew is the appearance of the letter פ (Pe) as the first root letter in many verbs that belong to the semantic field of breaking, separating, or spreading into multiple parts, see the whole list here.