The 3rd-Person-Plural Impersonal (אומרים ש…)

Everyday Hebrew has a remarkably simple way to leave the doer unnamed: put the verb in the third-person plural and omit the subject. אומרים ש… is literally shaped like “say-plural that…,” but it normally means “people say…” or “it is said…,” with no particular “they” in mind. The same strategy often gives the most natural spoken equivalent of an English passive.

A plural form with no plural group

The verb looks exactly like an ordinary third-person plural. What creates the impersonal reading is the empty subject position: nobody has been introduced as the people doing the saying, building, selling or stealing.

The understood doer is human and nonspecific: people in general, the relevant staff, the authorities, a thief nobody can identify. The construction does not normally describe wind, machinery or a known individual. It is also not a hidden pronoun. Modern Hebrew routinely omits ordinary subject pronouns, but here there is no recoverable group for a pronoun to name.

The minimal pair: no הם versus הם

Compare the same verb with and without הם. Both sentences are grammatical, but they answer different questions.

Adding הם therefore does not make this antecedentless impersonal sentence clearer. It supplies a referential masculine or mixed group that the listener must identify from context. English they can itself be vague—they say it'll rain—so English speakers tend to insert הם. In an antecedentless frame, a zero subject licenses the impersonal reading, whereas overt הם identifies a referential group. Elsewhere, a zero third-person subject may still be referential when discourse identifies it.

The spoken equivalent of an English passive

English readily promotes the affected thing to subject: my bike was stolen; the flight was cancelled; I was told to wait. Spoken Hebrew often keeps the ordinary active verb, leaves its subject empty and retains the affected participant in its usual object or complement position.

Nothing has become passive in Hebrew. האופניים and הטיסה remain definite direct objects and therefore keep את; לי remains the complement selected by אמר. This is why translating from the English surface word order is unreliable. Build the Hebrew active frame first, then omit the unknown agent.

Reference grammars describe precisely this use: a subjectless masculine plural predicate presents an action by an unspecified human agent, and it serves many of the discourse jobs for which English prefers a passive. The masculine plural is the language's unmarked mixed-group plural; it does not imply that the unknown people were all men.

Impersonal plural versus true passive

The two strategies can report the same event, but they package it differently. The impersonal plural feels like someone telling you what people did. The morphological passive makes the affected participant the grammatical subject and is especially comfortable in reports, notices and formal prose.

Using a true passive in conversation is grammatical. It may simply sound like a news update when the subjectless plural would sound like a person recounting what happened.

The full choice among active, passive and impersonal alternatives is mapped on choosing a passive strategy. The crucial point here is that the subjectless plural is not a defective passive. It is an independent, ordinary Hebrew construction.

A nearby written shortcut: כתוב ש…

Hebrew can also present written information with a passive participle and no expressed copula: כתוב ש… “it says / it is written that…”. This is not a third-person-plural verb, but learners meet it in the same situations because English again uses an impersonal it.

Use אומרים ש for circulating human speech and כתוב ש for text visible in a message, notice or document. Neither needs English they or it to appear as a Hebrew pronoun.

Common Mistakes

1. Inserting הם because English uses vague “they.” The form is grammatical, but the meaning changes from diffuse people to a specific group.

2. Moving the English passive subject in front of an active plural verb. The active construction still needs its object syntax.

3. Copying English object marking after אמר. The person told is marked with ל־, not את.

4. Adding a passive agent phrase to the active impersonal frame. Once a writer wants to name the agent, the sentence needs an active subject or a true passive.

Key Takeaways

• A bare third-person plural verb can have an unspecified human agent: אומרים, גנבו, בנו, אמרו, מוכרים.
• In this antecedentless frame, overt הם supplies a specific referent; elsewhere a discourse-recoverable referential subject may also be omitted.
• Spoken Hebrew commonly uses this active construction where English uses a passive: גנבו לי את האופניים, אמרו לי לחכות.
• The object stays an object, so definite objects keep את and verb government stays intact.
• True passives are grammatical and especially at home in written, official and report-like registers; the impersonal plural is the ordinary conversational alternative.
• כתוב ש… is a neighboring participial construction for reporting what a text says, not another plural verb.