Hebrew is a Semitic language spoken in Israel and by Jews worldwide (approximately 13 million speakers). Hebrew has lots of morphology and has somewhat strange properties like the absence of an “is” verb.
Download the Hebrew grammar specification
This file covers a few examples of the following:
While the verb types and their agreement are very similar to those of western languages with the exception occasionally of word order, one truly distinctive feature we will discuss here is the lack of an “is” verb. For example:
'the big dog' --------------------- ha kelev ha gadol 'the dog the big'
the second 'the' before big is a placeholder which can be substituted with a a pronoun to form a sentence.
'the dog is big' --------------------- ha kelev who gadol 'the dog he big'
this property is useful for long sentences where one may have forgotten the subject, allowing for constructions like:
'The boy who saw Yosef is big' --------------------- ha yeled she ra_a Yosef, who gadol 'the boy that saw Yosef, he big'
Yonatan saw Yosef --------------------- Yonatan ra_a Yosef
Yonatan yeshen --------------------- Yonatan sleeps
Yonatan gave the ball to Yosef --------------------- Yonatan **natan** ha kadur le Yosef
In all verb subject pairings, the number and gender must agree, prohibiting
Yonatan sleeps --------------------- Yonatan yeshenet
since yeshenet is the feminine form