A News Article, Annotated

An Israeli news report is written in a register nobody speaks. It has its own complementizer, its own way of not naming people, and its own tense logic — and none of that is taught in a course, because a course teaches you to talk. This page takes nine sentences of it apart.

The report below is a pastiche written for this page: the town, the community centre and the incident are all invented, and no real article is quoted, since a news report is fully protected expression and usually carries a byline as well. Headlines are the neighbouring page's subject — see headlines, decoded.

The report

כי, and what it did not replace

Count the complementizers. כי appears six times in these nine sentences — after מסרה, after הוסיפה, after נמסר, each time doubled by וכי on the second clause. In conversation every one of them would be ש.

Both are correct Hebrew. Neither is more grammatical than the other; כי in speech sounds like reading aloud, and ש in a wire report sounds like a first draft. This is register, not error — see ש, כי or אשר.

Now the part that is usually stated too broadly. ש has not disappeared from the report — it is there twice, in לאחר שהמאבטח and in ההודעה שנמסרה. But neither of those is a complementizer: the first is a temporal subordinator, the second a relative pronoun. כי competes with ש in exactly one slot, the that-clause after a verb of saying, thinking or reporting. Everywhere else ש has no rival and the register makes no difference at all.

Nobody is named, and the verb comes first

The report is full of things that happened to somebody with nobody doing them. נמצאו (were found), נעצרו (were arrested), נמסרה (was released), הובאו (were brought), נמסר (it was said), בוצעו (were carried out), יוחלף (will be replaced), דווח (it was reported) — eight finite verbs with no agent. And not one person is named anywhere in the piece: the humans who appear are all roles, דובר המשטרה, המאבטח, מנהלת המתנ״ס.

Three devices are at work, and they are worth separating.

That third one is very Israeli and worth having: במשטרה סירבו, בבנק אמרו, בעירייה החליטו. A prepositional phrase names the institution, the verb goes into the third-person plural, and no subject is stated. It is the written cousin of the spoken אמרו לי ש, and it is how a report attributes something to an organisation rather than to a person.

Notice too where the verbs sit. בזירה נמצאו טביעות אצבע puts the verb before its subject, and so does מהמשטרה נמסר כי. English word order fights this — At the scene were found fingerprints is archaic English — but in Hebrew it is the normal shape when the subject is new information. See VSO inversion.

Attribution is a noun phrase

English attributes with verbs: police said, she added, sources told. Hebrew journalism prefers to attribute with a preposition plus a noun, so the attribution never becomes a clause of its own.

• לדברי ledivréi — "according to the words of"; a construct form of דברים, so what follows is always a person or body.
• על פי al pi — "according to"; goes with a document or statement rather than a person: על פי ההודעה, על פי הדוח.
• מטעם mitá'am — "on behalf of, issued by": הודעה מטעם המשטרה.
• כך נמסר · כך דווח — a whole sentence used as a closing attribution: so it was said, so it was reported.

The advantage is compression. לדברי דובר המשטרה is three words and no verb; a police spokesman said that is five words and commits the sentence to a main clause. See nominalisation.

Reported tense does not move

Here is the point English speakers most need, and it changes meanings rather than styles.

English backshifts: He says he intends to resign becomes, in a report, He said he intended to resign — and the past tense on intended carries no information at all, it is pure agreement with said. Hebrew does not do this. The tense inside a reported clause is the tense the speaker actually used, and it stays there.

Those two are not stylistic variants. The first man still means to go; the second changed his mind before he ever spoke. English collapses both into he said he intended to resign, which is why an English speaker translating into Hebrew reaches for the past tense and quietly rewrites the story. The same logic runs through the report: נמשכת in נמסר כי החקירה נמשכת is present because the police said "the investigation is continuing", and מבוטח in כי המקום מבוטח is present because the manager said "the place is insured". See reported speech.

Ages, times and dates in the news formula

The same story, as somebody would tell it

Take the first sentence of the report and say it out loud to a friend. Almost everything changes:

אמש became אתמול בלילה. The report's subject פורצים vanished into a bare third-person plural פרצו, which is how speech says someone. The compact ציוד מחשבים became the concrete כל המחשבים, with את on it because it is now definite. And the sentence has grown a frame — שמעתי ש — because a speaker says where they got it from and a report does not.

Common Mistakes

1. Backshifting the reported tense. This is the single most consequential English habit in the whole register, because it does not produce bad Hebrew — it produces good Hebrew that says something else.

2. Putting את on the subject of a passive. English they arrested the suspects and Hebrew נעצרו החשודים look parallel, and the object marker comes along for the ride.

3. Reading כי as "because". It is the first meaning anyone learns, and after a verb of saying it is the wrong one.

4. Reading בן before a numeral as "son of". בן is one of the commonest words in Hebrew and it does two unrelated jobs.

Key Takeaways

• כי is the journalistic complementizer — six of them in nine sentences here, where speech would use ש every time. It is register, not correctness.
• כי replaced ש in one slot only, the that-clause. As a relative pronoun (ההודעה שנמסרה) and after לאחר, ש is untouched.
• The report names almost nobody. Passives (נמצאו, הובאו, בוצעו), an impersonal נמסר כי with no subject at all, and the institution-plus-plural-verb pattern במשטרה סירבו all delete the agent.
• The verb comes before its subject when the subject is new: בזירה נמצאו טביעות אצבע.
• Attribution is prepositional — לדברי a person, על פי a document, מטעם a body, and כך נמסר as a closing line.
• Hebrew does not backshift. אמר כי הוא מתכוון and אמר כי התכוון are two different stories, not two registers. The tense inside the clause is the one the speaker used.
• בן / בת before a numeral means aged, and the numeral is feminine because it counts שנים.
• Spoken retellings undo all of it: אמש becomes אתמול בלילה, an indefinite subject becomes a bare plural verb, and the whole thing acquires a שמעתי ש frame.