Why is “face” plural?… (And other reflections on the Hebrew language)

(Apologies in advance to readers who don’t share my obsession with odd rules of grammar.)

In a previous post I talked about the bewildering application of the gender rules in the Hebrew language. Today, I am going to focus on one of the other peculiarities of this very interesting language; the fact that several words are only used in their plural form.

For example, “panim”, the word for “face”, is also the word for “faces” and has no singular form. (“im” is the common plural ending for a male noun.) So “a face in the street” is the same as “faces in the street”. Both translate to “panim ba rehov”. The verb form that goes with it is plural and so are the adjectives. This is, to say the least, a challenge for a new Hebrew speaker (a.k.a. me), since you have to remember that if you want to say that ” her face was beautiful”, you have to remember to say that “her faces were beautiful”, and make sure that the word “beautiful” is also plural. Who thinks this way?

The same is true for water (mayim), sky (shamayim), and life (chaim). “A blue sky” is said the same way as “blue skies”, blue water is “blue waters” and so on. “A life was lost” is the same as “lives were lost”.

But perhaps the most interesting example of a word that always appears in the plural form, is “Elohim”, the first word for God to appear in the Torah. As with the words above, the ending “im” is the classic plural (male) indicator. But in stark contrast to the words above, when you use Elohim to mean God, everything else (verbs, adjectives etc.) are in the singular, a rare grammatical mismatch in Hebrew. But one that leaves no doubt as to the singularity of Elohim.

Unless… you really are referring to more than one god, in which case it is still possible to use “Elohim”, but in such a case plural verbs and adjectives are required. (You had to know there would be a twist.)

The best example of this is in the Torah itself, where the ten commandments begin: I am the Lord your God (Elohim) who brought you forth from Egypt out of the house of bondage. You shall have no other (plural adjective) gods (Elohim) before me. In these two short sentences “elohim” is used both ways, by Elohim himself.

When we chant in Hebrew, “Adonai Eloheinu” (The Lord is our God), we are grammatically saying “The Lord is our Gods”, which may account for the frequent addition of “The Lord is One”. (Let there be no confusion.)

I am probably not standing on firm theological ground here, but I feel this could be viewed as a linguistically elegant illustration of the shift from polytheism to monotheism. Many gods (“elohim”) morph grammatically into one “elohim” with the mere change of verb and adjective to the singular (male, of course) form.

Coming back to the word “panim” (face/faces). It has an additional feature that sets it apart from water, sky, life (and Elohim). Not only is it always used in plural form, it can also be either masculine or feminine. There is a choice. This gender fluidity, as you may recall from an earlier post, is an attribute held by a number of nouns, and was most recently bestowed on the humble sock.

None of this of course answers the question, “Why?”. Unsurprisingly, I am not the first to have posed this question, but the speculative theories I have encountered so far have been not been convincing. Some people undertake a poetic explanation along the lines of “people show many faces to the world”, so the word is aptly plural. (I don’t buy it.) Others compare it to “moose” in English which can be either plural or singular. This misses the point, since you would never use “the moose were beautiful” and have it interpreted as a single moose; but this is exactly what happens with “panim”.

I took a look at the Hebrew Academy’s website to see if they have anything to say about the “plural face” issue and, at the very least, I learned that this phenomenon does have a technical name: “the perpetual plural”. They note that some linguists theorize that because these are such ancient words, they may have come into use before a distinction was made between singular and plural. This might make sense for “water” and “sky” and possibly even “life”, but it’s hard to see it for “face”.

So unfortunately, I cannot explain why face is always plural in Hebrew. I can however account for why the word “moose” behaves oddly in English. It was borrowed fairly recently (by language standards) from an indigenous North American language, and since it already ends with an “s” sound, it was decided to just leave it that way. It was not aligned with “goose/geese” because that plural convention, along with “foot/feet”, “tooth/teeth” etc. is from a much earlier form of English, that actually predates the use of the “s” suffix.

And before I go any further down this particular rabbit hole, I will mercifully close this post.

You’re welcome.

(And in a postscript for Hebrew speakers, I also learned that the word “pan” (meaning “facet”) — which looks like it could have been the original singular form of “panim” — only came into use in medieval times. It derives from “panim” and not the other way around. )