Welcome to Helen’s Neighbourhood!
In Hebrew, a binyan is a building, a structure.
You can think of the Hebrew verb patterns as organized into a neighborhood of apartment buildings. All the buildings have the same floor plan but with different theme décor.
In each building, there is a floor for each verb form: perfect, imperfect, narrative, commands, infinitives, and participles. On each floor, there are a number of suites – for roots with three strong letters, for roots that end in ה, for roots that begin with ע, with י, with נ, etc. Each suite is divided into rooms by gender, number, and person.
Binyan pa’al is the base, the model from which the other binyanim are “derived.” Each room in the other buildings starts from the base and applies a transformation that is characteristic of the binyan, to produce words with related meanings.
The binyanim are named after the word that is found in one particular room of the building: the masculine, singular, third-person perfect form. The base binyan is called pa’al פָּעַל. There are six major derived binyanim, plus a few shacks on the outskirts of town for variations that don’t quite fit the norm. The six major derived binyanim are nif’al נִפְעַל, hif’il הִפְעִיל, pi’el פִּעֵל, hitpa’el הִתְפַּעֵל, hof’al הָפְעַל, and pu’al פֻּעַל.