An Introduction to Biblical Hebrew Syntax

in a way somewhat different from that of speakers in another[Page 112] culture.
Linguistic studies cannot be divorced from anthropology and sociology. It is a
cultural and linguistic fact that the English speaker, conceiving of ‘face’ as a
countable noun, manifests that perception by the singular, while the speaker of
Classical Hebrew probably perceived it as a mass and represented it by a plural.
c Languages may also differ in their use of grammatical number because of
differing perceptions of what counts as “one object” and what counts as “more
than one object” (i.e., a countable), what counts as a coherent “group of objects”
(i.e., a collective), or as an undifferentiated “mass of material” (i.e., a mass, e.g.,
‘butter’); these perceptions help to shape a language’s lexical structure. For
example, English treats ‘grape’ as a countable (‘Will you have some grapes?’), but
‘fruit’ as a collective (‘Will you have some fruit?’); Russian treats them in exactly
the opposite way. 1 So also English treats ‘birds’ as countable but Hebrew refers to
them with a collective.
d Furthermore, a noun’s grammatical number is determined by the language’s
lexical structure, and thus it does not represent the speaker’s thought or experience
directly. For example, English lexical structure demands that ‘oats’ be represented
as a plural (‘The oats are in the field’) but ‘wheat’ as a singular (‘The wheat is in
the barn’). We cannot argue that speakers of English think of ‘oats’ as plural and
‘wheat’ as singular; this is simply false. An old joke plays on this lack of
correspondence:
Teacher: Is ‘trousers’ singular or plural?
Johnny: Please, sir, singular at the top and plural at the bottom.
‘Trousers’ is in fact a plural-invariable noun, like other garment terms (‘pants,
pajamas’) as well as tool names (‘pliers, scissors, glasses’) in English. Hebrew
also has plural-invariable nouns. 2
e The most striking culturally determined difference between Hebrew and English
number usage involves honorifics. Many European languages (e.g., French,
Italian, Russian, German) systematically use plural forms with singular referents
to express honor to the referent. For example, in the second-person singular,
German uses both Sie, grammatical plural to express respect, and du, grammatical
1
John Lyons, Introduction to Theoretical Linguistics (Cambridge: Cambridge
University, 1968) 282.
2
They are sometimes called by the Latin term plurale tantum (pl. pluralia tantum).