4.4 Parsing vs. Inflecting

When we take a base word and do something with it, such as change its gender or number, we call that inflecting the word
- For example, say you had the English word mouse. The word mice would be inflecting mouse into its plural form
- In this course, inflecting is kept to a minimum.
- Reading the Hebrew Bible never requires this skill⁵⁹

Parsing is somewhat of the opposite concept where we take an inflected word and break it down into its base form to determine its meaning

For example, let’s say you had the English word mice, you didn’t know what it meant and needed to look it up.
- Let’s further assume there was no dictionary entry for mice (Hebrew dictionaries often do not have separate entries for a word’s plural forms).
- You would need to PARSE it = Mice is the plural form of mouse. In other words, mice is two or more of whatever a mouse is.
- You could then look up mouse and be on your way
- Reading the Hebrew Bible does require us to parse

When we parse a word, we identify the lexical form and the inflected person, gender, and number to understand what the word is communicating to us

We also have identified the lexical form so we can look it up in a dictionary
Beginning with this lesson, you will see an Anki chapter called Workbook, which will have some activities like parsing

Since inflecting can helpful when learning about verb forms, some of the Unit III Ruth Pursuit activities will involve a small amount of inflecting↩︎