New Roots from Loanwords (לסמס, לגגל, לפלרטט)

English borrows a verb by taking the whole word and adding its own endings: google, googled, googling. Hebrew cannot do that, because a Hebrew verb has no stem to add endings to — it has a consonant skeleton and a mould. So when a foreign word is verbed, Hebrew does something that has no English counterpart: it reads the consonants off the loan, discards its vowels entirely, treats what is left as a root, and pours that root into a binyan.

The result does not look borrowed. Google goes in and גיגלתי comes out, and nothing about גיגלתי is foreign except the letters it started from.

The mechanism, in three steps

1. Read off the consonants. SMS gives s-m-s; Google gives g-g-l (the oo and the e are vowels and are simply dropped); synchronise gives s-n-kh-r-n.
2. Write them as a root. ס־מ־ס, ג־ג־ל, ס־נ־כ־ר־ן. From this moment the word has no history — it behaves like any other Hebrew root.
3. Pour it into פיעל if the sense is something you do, or into התפעל if it is something reflexive, reciprocal, or a process you undergo.

Why פיעל, and why not פעל

The reason is mechanical rather than stylistic. As four-letter roots sets out, פיעל's stem has four consonant positions — a triliteral root fills the spare one by doubling its middle radical (dib·bér), and a four-letter root fills it with a real letter (tir·gém). פעל, נפעל and הפעיל have three positions each and no doubling anywhere, so there is simply no vacancy for a fourth consonant.

Loanwords almost always supply four or more consonants. That single fact routes nearly all of them into פיעל, with פועל as the passive and התפעל as the reflexive.

But there is a second reason, and it is about the state of the language rather than about syllables: פעל is essentially closed to new verbs. Bolozky's 1978 survey of modern coinages found only two recent denominative verbs formed in פעל at all — the slang items he transcribes gamaz and xarap — and נפעל is closed alongside it. So even a loan that happened to yield exactly three consonants, as ס־מ־ס and ג־ג־ל do, still goes to פיעל. It is not a matter of fit; פעל has stopped accepting applications.

The התפעל side

התפעל takes the same borrowed roots whenever the meaning turns back on the subject — a process undergone, a state entered, or something done mutually rather than to an object.

Notice לְהִסְתַּנְכְּרֵן: the ת of הת־ and the ס of the root have swapped places. That is the ordinary התפעל metathesis, triggered by any root starting with ס, שׂ, שׁ or צ, and a borrowed root is subject to it exactly like a native one — which is a small but decisive proof that the loan has been fully naturalised.

The one binyan outside פיעל that still takes loans

It is tempting to conclude that every other binyan is shut. That is not what the sources say. הפעיל is not closed. It stays productive in two identifiable places (Bat-El 2013; Bolozky 2007):

• Inchoatives — becoming something: הִשְׁחִיר "turned black", הִבְרִיא "got better", הִרְזָה "lost weight". פיעל does not compete for these.
• Cluster-preserving loans, where the source word begins with a consonant cluster that הפעיל can keep whole: הִשְׁפְּרִיץ hishpríts "sprayed" (Yiddish shpritsn), הִסְנִיף hisníf "sniffed". הפעיל's frame is hi-CC-í-C, so shp- rides into the first slot intact; פיעל would have to break it up into shi-p-, and speakers do not want that.

What Bolozky (2007) documents is a register-conditioned retreat, not a closure: הפעיל remains the preferred choice in literary Hebrew, while colloquial Hebrew increasingly reaches for פיעל for the same job. Those are two different facts, and the difference matters — a page that tells you הפעיל is dead will leave you unable to explain הבריז, הפליק or השפריץ.

Register bands, which move fast

These verbs are not interchangeable in style, and the bands shift within a decade. Three groups, honestly labelled:

• Fully neutral, invisible as loans: לְאַרְגֵּן, לְטַלְפֵּן, לְפַרְגֵּן, לְסַנְכְּרֵן. You will find them in legislation and in the news; nobody hears them as foreign.
• Neutral in journalism, faintly loaded: לְפַבְרֵק — it means fabricate in the accusatory sense, so it carries its judgement with it.
• Slang: לְסַמֵּס and לְגַגֵּל carry a slang tag in the dictionaries; לְהִתְמַסְטֵל is drug slang and no newspaper will print it unquoted.
• Colloquial but unlabelled: לְזַפְזֵף, לִפְלַרְטֵט — everyday spoken Hebrew that no dictionary flags at all; out of place only in formal writing.

Once the root exists, there are no shortcuts

This is where English speakers actually go wrong, and it is not about morphology theory — it is about code-switching. Having learned that Hebrew borrows freely, learners drop the English verb into an otherwise Hebrew sentence and leave it uninflected.

A borrowed root is a root. The verb built on it takes person, gender, number and tense like any other פיעל verb, with no exceptions and no reduced paradigm: גִּיגַּלְתִּי, תְּגַגְּלִי, מְגַגֵּל, יְגַגְּלוּ; סִימַּסְתִּי, מְסַמֶּסֶת, נְסַמֵּס.

Two orthographic footnotes, both belonging elsewhere. When a loan brings a sound the alphabet lacks, the root letter keeps its geresh — צ׳ = tsh, ג׳ = j, ז׳ = zh, as in צ׳יפס, ג׳ינס, ז׳אנר; the rules are on foreign words in Hebrew spelling. And the three-consonant loans take a plene yod in unpointed writing (סימס, גיגל) while the four-consonant ones do not (פרגן, סנכרן, פברק), for the reason set out on four-letter roots.

Common Mistakes

1. Dropping the English verb in unchanged. The commonest error by a wide margin, and it is a code-switch rather than a Hebrew form.

2. Keeping the loan's vowel letters in the root. The vowels are exactly what the process throws away.

3. Skipping the התפעל metathesis on a borrowed root. Learners treat loan roots as exempt from native phonology. They are not.

4. Using the citation form for every person. These verbs are cited, like all Hebrew verbs, as past third-person masculine singular — and that form means "he did it", not "did".

Key Takeaways

• Hebrew verbs a loanword by reading off its consonants, discarding its vowels, and treating the skeleton as a root: Google → ג־ג־ל → גיגלתי.
• The landing sites are פיעל (things you do) and התפעל (reflexive, reciprocal, or a process undergone), with פועל as the passive: מפוברק.
• The structural reason is that פיעל has a fourth consonant position and loans usually supply four or more consonants; the historical reason is that פעל is essentially closed — Bolozky (1978) found only two recent denominatives in it.
• הפעיל is not closed. It stays productive for inchoatives (השחיר, הבריא, הרזה) and for cluster-preserving loans (השפריץ, הסניף), and its retreat is register-conditioned, not total (Bolozky 2007; Bat-El 2013).
• Register bands: לארגן, לטלפן, לפרגן, לסנכרן are fully neutral; לסמס and לגגל are tagged slang by both Pealim and ויקימילון, and להתמסטל is drug slang; לזפזף and לפלרטט are colloquial but carry no dictionary label.
• A borrowed root is a full root: it inflects for person, gender, number and tense, and it undergoes native phonology, including the התפעל metathesis in להסתנכרן.