Pu'al Past and Future: סודר, יסודר

This page is filed at C1 for a reason that has nothing to do with difficulty. The endings are the ordinary Hebrew ones and the stem barely moves. What makes it late material is register: these forms live in news copy, minutes, court decisions and Wikipedia, and are thin on the ground in conversation, where Israelis reach instead for the agentless third-person plural.

The past, all nine cells

Two things to read off it. The stem vowel behaves exactly as it does in the pi'el past — patach before a consonant-initial ending, shva before a vowel-initial one: sudárti but sudrá, sudrú. And in ktiv male the vav is the only thing distinguishing the whole paradigm from the pi'el active: סודרתי against סידרתי, סודרה against סידרה. Drop the vav and you have flipped the voice.

Which cells are actually used

Here the honest answer is per-verb, not per-binyan, and the usual textbook line — "pu'al has no first or second person" — is simply false.

It is true of a verb whose subject is a thing. סידר arranges rooms and files, so סודרתי "I was arranged" is close to unusable; a search of Hebrew Wikipedia for סודרתי returns nothing at all, against 445 for the bare string סודר.

But plenty of pi'el verbs act on people, and their pu'al persons are perfectly ordinary Hebrew. פיטר "fired" gives פוטרתי, which any Israeli says without a second thought. So check the verb, not the binyan.

סידר itself has a sense that does act on people: Milog glosses it, among the tidying senses, as הונה, רימה "cheated, swindled" — הוא סידר אותי ולקח את כל הכסף. So a pu'al סודרתי "I was had" is formable and any Israeli would understand it. Listen to how the thing is actually said, though, and you get the impersonal plural every time. That is this page in miniature: a cell can be perfectly grammatical and still lose to a rival construction.

The future

The prefixes are the pi'el ones with the pi'el vowels emptied out: יְ־ תְּ־ נְ־ אֲ־, never the יִ־ of pa'al. On the ־נָה row Pealim does not say "archaic"; its note is "in modern language, the masculine form is generally used", and that is the accurate description — the form is normative and printable, but תסודרו covers both genders in anything you will hear or write.

The two verbs you will meet in reading

פורסם and תורגם carry most of the finite pu'al you will ever encounter, because publishing and translating are what encyclopedias and newspapers talk about. Both are four-radical, so nothing doubles, and both are written with the vav in Pealim and Milog alike — פורסם, תורגם, never פרסם or תרגם, which are the active forms.

The frequency profile is worth seeing, because it is the register argument in one line. Counting exact strings in Hebrew Wikipedia (August 2026): פורסם 19,078 · פורסמה 4,887 · תורגם 6,788 · תורגמה 739 · יפורסם 583. The past dominates the future by an order of magnitude, and the whole set belongs to a genre that reports events without naming who caused them.

Still no infinitive — so restructure

pu'al has present, past and future and stops there. Whenever English hands you to be sorted, needs to be cancelled, should be published, Hebrew makes you rebuild the sentence, and there are only two moves:

• Active infinitive with an object — צריך לסדר את זה, אפשר לבטל את ההזמנה. This is the default.
• A hitpa'el, where one exists — להתפרסם is the living "to be published", להתבטל the living "to be cancelled".

Common Mistakes

1. Reaching for an infinitive that was never built.

2. Giving a pu'al verb a direct object. The vav makes it passive, and a passive has no room for את.

3. Speaking in press-release Hebrew. Neither of these is wrong — but they are not interchangeable socially, and learners who have studied the paradigm reach for the first one at a kitchen table.

4. Flattening the stress onto the ending. The vowel-initial cells are milra, the consonant-initial ones mil'el, and learners level them.

Key Takeaways

• The endings are the ordinary Hebrew ones; only the u–a stem is new. סֻדַּרְתִּי, סֻדַּר, סֻדְּרָה, סֻדְּרוּ.
• The vav carries the voice. סודרתי is passive, סידרתי is active, and in ktiv male that letter is the entire difference.
• Stress: mil'el before a consonant-initial ending (sudárti), milra before a vowel-initial one (sudrá, sudrú).
• Future prefixes are יְ־ תְּ־ נְ־ אֲ־. תסודרנה is normative, not archaic — Pealim's note is that the masculine form is generally used instead.
• Do not write off the person cells wholesale. סודרתי goes unused because rooms are not "I"; פוטרתי is everyday Hebrew because people get fired. Check the verb, not the binyan.
• פורסם and תורגם are the two you will genuinely meet, and both keep the vav in Pealim and Milog.
• There is no infinitive. "Needs to be X" becomes an active infinitive with an object (צריך לסדר את זה) or a hitpa'el (להתפרסם).
• In speech, the impersonal plural wins: ביטלו לנו את הטיסה, not הטיסה בוטלה.