Modern Hebrew grammar

The grammar of Modern Hebrew shares similarities with that of its Biblical Hebrew counterpart, but it has evolved significantly over time. Modern Hebrew grammar incorporates analytic constructions, expressing such forms as dative, allative, and accusative using prepositional particles rather than morphological cases.

Modern Hebrew grammar is also fusional synthetic: inflection plays a role in the formation of verbs and nouns (using non-concatenative discontinuous morphemes realised by vowel transfixation) and the declension of prepositions (i.e. with pronominal suffixes).

Examples of Hebrew here are represented using the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) as well as native script. Although most speakers collapse the phonemes /ħ, ʕ/ into /χ, ʔ/, the distinction is maintained by a limited number of speakers and will therefore be indicated here for maximum coverage. In the transcriptions, /r/ is used for the rhotic, which in Modern Hebrew phonology is more commonly a lax voiced uvular approximant [ʁ].

Hebrew is written from right to left.

Every Hebrew sentence must contain at least one subject, at least one predicate, usually but not always a verb, and possibly other arguments and complements.

Word order in Modern Hebrew is somewhat similar to that in English: as opposed to Biblical Hebrew, where the word order is verb-subject-object, the usual word order in Modern Hebrew is subject-verb-object. Thus, if there is no case marking, one can resort to the word order. Modern Hebrew is characterized by an asymmetry between definite objects and indefinite objects. There is an accusative marker, et, only before a definite object (mostly a definite noun or personal name). Et-ha is currently undergoing fusion and reduction to become ta.Consider ten li et ha-séfer ("give:2ndPerson.Masculine.Singular.Imperative to-me ACCUSATIVE the-book"), meaning "Give me the book," where et, though functioning syntactically as a case marker, is formally a preposition, and ha is the definite article. This sentence is realised phonetically as ten li ta-séfer.

In sentences where the predicate is a verb, the word order is usually subject–verb–object (SVO), as in English. However, word order can change in the following instances:

Generally, Hebrew marks every noun in a sentence with some sort of preposition, with the exception of subjects and semantically indefinite direct objects. Unlike English, indirect objects require prepositions (Hebrew "הוּא נָתַן לִי אֶת הַכַּדּוּר" /hu naˈtan li ʔet ha-kaˈdur/ (literally "he gave to-me direct-object-marker the ball) in contrast to English "He gave me the ball") and semantically definite direct objects are introduced by the preposition את /et/ (Hebrew "הוּא נָתַן לִי אֶת הַכַּדּוּר" /hu naˈtan li ʔet ha-kaˈdur/ (literally "he gave to-me direct-object-marker the ball) in contrast to English "He gave me the ball").