Huf'al Present: מוזמן, מודפס, מוגש

The huf'al present is the part of the binyan you will meet first and most often, because it is what invitations, menus, notices and forms are written in — and because a good handful of these participles have quietly become everyday adjectives. Like every Hebrew present tense it has four cells and no person marking: one word covers I am, you are and he is.

The four cells

Two things to fix in memory straight away. The feminine singular ends in ־ֶת, not ־ָה — muzménet, with the stress pulled back — and there is no such word as מוזמנה. And the *vav is the whole visual signal: it sits one letter in from the front, immediately after the מ, and nothing else in the language puts a u exactly there.

Reference grammars point the same forms in classical ktiv haser, with a kubuts and no vav (מֻזְמָן, מֻזְמֶנֶת). That is the same word; modern spelling writes the vav and points it as a shuruk.

Two more roots, and what the shape does to them

מוגש has only two visible root letters, and that is not a typo. The root is נ־ג־שׁ, and its נ has assimilated into the following letter — you can see the dagesh in the ג in מוּגָּשׁ. This is the same thing that happens in the hif'il הִגִּישׁ, where the נ is equally invisible, so the huf'al is not doing anything new; it is inheriting a habit of the פ״נ class. Say mugásh, not mungásh.

Three מ־forms that look alike, and the vowel that separates them

This is where the real difficulty sits. Three different things put a מ in front and a rounded vowel near it, and unpointed they can look almost identical.

Two tests settle it. Where is the rounded vowel? huf'al puts it immediately after the מ (mu-zmán); pu'al buries it one syllable further in (me-su-dár). What is the stem vowel? huf'al has an a (muzmán, mudpás, mugásh); the hif'il פ״י type has a long i (moríd, modía, motsí). So מוריד and מוזמן differ in voice, in binyan and in both vowels, even though they open with the same two letters — and the hif'il ones are active: they mean "lowers" and "announces", not "is lowered" and "is announced". Their family lives on hif'il's פ״י verbs.

When the first root letter is a guttural: two standard pointings

Where the first radical is ח or ע, the prefix vowel has two recognised vocalisations, and both are standard. You will meet both in pointed text, and neither is an error.

The pair is printed below the way Pealim and the reference grammars cite it, in the classical vav-less pointing — the same convention as the מֻזְמָן quoted earlier, and the one place on this page where the pointing is not the ktiv-male pointing of the paradigm tables. That is deliberate: what the doublet contrasts is the prefix vowel, an o against a u, and the classical pointing is the shape in which the two variants are traditionally set side by side. The bottom row is an ordinary root with no such choice, so it stays in the ktiv-male pointing used everywhere else here.

Ordinary roots like ז־מ־ן and ד־פ־ס have no such choice. And in unpointed writing the whole distinction disappears anyway: מוחלט is מוחלט whichever pointing you had in mind.

אתה מוזמן is an ordinary participle

You will hear אתה מוזמן, את מוזמנת and אתם מוזמנים constantly — on invitations, at reception desks, at the end of announcements. It is worth being precise about what it is: an ordinary huf'al participle used predicatively, "you are invited". Milog, Pealim and both Wiktionaries were checked, and none of them carries a separate permissive or politeness entry for the string. So it is not an idiom you memorise as a block; it is the participle doing exactly what a participle does, in a context where Hebrew happens to use the passive to sound welcoming rather than commanding.

That does mean it agrees, every time, like an adjective — מוזמן to one man, מוזמנת to one woman, מוזמנים to a group.

The ones that have stopped feeling like verbs

Several huf'al participles have drifted into plain adjectives, and Milog gives most of them a lexical entry of their own separate from the verb: מוכן ready, מובן obvious, מוגבל limited, מוגזם over the top, מודאג worried, מוצדק justified, מוכר familiar, מותר permitted. If you already use those without thinking, you already use the huf'al present. They get their own page.

Common Mistakes

1. Reading the מ־ as "the one who does it". In pi'el and hif'il the מ־ present is agentive, so learners extend that to huf'al and make מוכן mean "preparer".

2. Giving the feminine singular an ־ה. Every other adjective-like word takes ־ָה, so learners regularise this one too.

3. Putting the u in the pu'al slot. The two passives differ by exactly where the rounded vowel sits, and getting it wrong lands you on a real but unrelated word.

4. Losing the agreement. These forms agree in gender and number like adjectives, and a plural noun in a notice is exactly where the slip happens.

Key Takeaways

• Four cells, no person: מוזמן · מוזמנת · מוזמנים · מוזמנות. The feminine singular ends ־ת, never ־ה.
• The marker is a vav one letter in from the front — mu-, right after the מ.
• מוגש shows only two root letters: נ־ג־שׁ with the נ assimilated into the dagesh, exactly as in the hif'il הגיש.
• Three lookalikes, separated by vowels: huf'al muzmán (u after the מ, a in the stem), hif'il פ״י moríd / modía (o from the root's own י, long i in the stem, and active), pu'al me-su-dár (u inside the stem).
• Where the first radical is ח or ע, two pointings are standard — מָחְלָט ~ מֻחְלָט, מָעֳבָר ~ מֻעֲבָר, cited in the classical vav-less pointing because the difference is in the prefix vowel; written out they are just מוחלט and מועבר. Ordinary roots have only one.
• אתה מוזמן / את מוזמנת is a plain predicative participle, not a fixed idiom — and it agrees every time.
• A whole set of these participles now live as ordinary adjectives: מוכן, מובן, מוגבל, מוגזם, מודאג, מוצדק, מוכר, מותר.