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- "הסכין חותכת את האוכל שלנו."
19 Comments
1928
No, the plural for סכין will always be סכינים. But you can match it with both m. f. adjectives or verbs.
Sorry but as a native English speaker I would never say the knife is cutting my food, I would say the knife is for cutting up my food
- 1928
All nouns in Hebrew have a gender. Most are either male or female, but some have a dual-gender and can be referred to as either male or female. In this case, סכין is a noun than can be both male or female, and the example given uses it with a female form conjugation.
I hope this makes things clearer for you.
BezalelP, is סכין more commonly used as feminine in most contexts, or in the context of food, or is the choice arbitrary and independent of context?
2020-06-10 rich739183
- 723
You want to know "why is that knife paired with a feminine verb?" - but your wording is awkward. In English a knife can't be a girl, but it can be seen as feminine (which means "girlish" but we don't say it that way.).
I'm glad Bezalel saw through that and was able to answer you.
I don't think it helps people who are new to the concept of grammatical gender to imply that an inanimate object itself can have gender. They need to be told clearly that it's only the noun that has gender. Otherwise, consider their confusion when they encounter the names of objects - and even body parts, such as רֶחֶם - that are associated with one biological gender more than another but do not have the same grammatical gender.
2019-09-09 rich739183
I think because the people inputting the correct answers didn't want to include too many weird syntactic orders. The most basic way of constructing that sentence is "The knife is cutting our food". While "the food of ours" is grammatically correct, it's clunky and not commonly used.
- 723
That is the plural form. The singular is "khotékhet."
Hasakín chotékhet et haókhel shelánu.
