הפרווה נקייה.

Breakdown of הפרווה נקייה.

נקי
clean
פרווה
fur

Questions & Answers about הפרווה נקייה.

How do you pronounce הפרווה נקייה?

A natural pronunciation is ha-par-vá ne-ki-yá.

  • הפרווה = ha-parvá
  • נקייה = nekiyá

The stress is on the last syllable of both words.

Why is there no word for is in the sentence?

In Hebrew, present-tense sentences like X is Y often do not use a separate word for is.

So:

  • הפרווה נקייה = The fur is clean

This is very normal Hebrew.
If you wanted past or future, you would usually use forms of להיות (to be), for example:

  • הפרווה הייתה נקייה = The fur was clean
  • הפרווה תהיה נקייה = The fur will be clean
Why is it נקייה and not נקי?

Because פרווה is a feminine singular noun, and the adjective has to agree with it.

So:

  • masculine singular: נקי = clean
  • feminine singular: נקייה = clean

Since הפרווה is feminine singular, the adjective must also be feminine singular:

  • הפרווה נקייה

If the noun were masculine, you would use נקי instead.

How do I know that פרווה is feminine?

You mostly learn a noun’s gender as part of the word.

In this case, פרווה is feminine. The ending often suggests a feminine noun, and here that matches the actual gender.

That is why the adjective is feminine:

  • פרווה נקייה
  • not פרווה נקי
Why does only הפרווה have ה־ and not נקייה?

Because this sentence means The fur is clean, where נקייה is the predicate adjective.

In Hebrew, predicate adjectives usually do not take ה־.

So:

  • הפרווה נקייה = The fur is clean

But if you mean the clean fur as one noun phrase, then the adjective also becomes definite:

  • הפרווה הנקייה = the clean fur

This is a very important difference:

  • הפרווה נקייה = full sentence
  • הפרווה הנקייה = noun phrase, not a full sentence by itself
What is the difference between הפרווה נקייה and הפרווה הנקייה?

They look similar, but they do different jobs.

  • הפרווה נקייה = The fur is clean
    This is a sentence.

  • הפרווה הנקייה = the clean fur
    This is just a noun phrase.

So the presence or absence of ה־ on the adjective helps show whether you are describing the noun inside a phrase or making a statement about it.

Is the word order normal here?

Yes. This is the normal order:

  • subject + adjective
  • הפרווה נקייה

Literally, it is something like:

  • the fur clean

That is a standard way to say The fur is clean in Hebrew.

Why is נקייה spelled with ייה at the end?

That spelling reflects the feminine form of this adjective.

The masculine is:

  • נקי

The feminine is:

  • נקייה

So the ending changes when the adjective becomes feminine singular.
This is just the form you need to learn for this word pair:

  • נקינקייה
Could פרווה mean something other than fur?

Yes. The spelling פרווה can also be familiar to English speakers from Jewish food vocabulary, where pareve/parve means neither meat nor dairy.

But in this sentence, because of the meaning and context, הפרווה means the fur.

So Hebrew readers use context to know which meaning is intended.

If I wanted to say The fur is not clean, how would that work?

You would usually put לא before the adjective:

  • הפרווה לא נקייה = The fur is not clean

That follows the same basic pattern:

  • subject + לא + adjective

So the original sentence is easy to expand once you know the structure.

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