Does Hebrew Have Verbs?

A detailed post on LessWrong by user Benquo has gone viral by revisiting a radical claim from Baruch Spinoza's unfinished 1677 work, 'Compendium of Hebrew Grammar.' Spinoza argued that, with few exceptions, all words in Hebrew are nouns (or 'names'). For centuries, scholars dismissed this as either a philosophical imposition or a vacuous terminological trick. The new analysis contends these dismissals are wrong because they assume the noun/verb distinction—fundamental to Greek and Latin grammar—is a linguistic universal. In reality, it's a framework poorly suited to Hebrew's structure.

The core of the argument lies in Semitic morphology. Hebrew words are built by applying vowel patterns to consonantal roots (like k-t-v for concepts related to writing). The same root can generate what Indo-European grammars would call a verb (katav, 'he wrote'), a noun (ktav, 'script'), or an agent noun (kotev, 'writer'). The post asserts that the morphological machinery is consistent; the categorical output as a 'noun' or 'verb' is a function of the applied pattern, not an inherent, separate system. Therefore, medieval grammarians—influenced by Arabic tradition which itself borrowed from Aristotle—created confusion by forcing Hebrew into a foreign categorical box, leading Spinoza to correctly note that 'regular' forms were misclassified as 'irregular.'