[b-hebrew] Survey Question about use of Biblical Hebrew in class
Rolf Furuli
furuli at online.no
Sun Jun 14 16:09:15 EDT 2009
Dear Randall,
What actually is "Biblical Hebrew in a spoken BH classroom"? And
what is its advantage? The reason why I ask is the following
observation: I teach Norwegian speakers intermediate Biblical Hebrew,
and also Hebrew on the MA and Ph.D levels. Some years ago a fleshly
brother and a sister attended my course of intermediate Hebrew. Their
parents were Norwegians, but they had grown up in Israel and were
fluent both in Norwegian and modern Hebrew. This background evidently
was a disadvantage for them. Because of their modern Hebrew
background, it was not as easy for them to learn Biblical Hebrew (the
subtleties of the language) as the Norwegian students, and their exam
results were inferior to the results of the Norwegian students.
I tried to ascertain the reason for this situation, and one
possibility I thought of was that the two did not work so hard
because they thought they already mastered Hebrew. My impression,
however, was that this was not the reason, because they both were
diligent students. So my conclusion is that it is harder for a
student with a background in the modern Hebrew tense system to
understand the real nature of the Biblical Hebrew verb conjugations
and the subtleties of Biblical Hebrew than a Norwegian student who is
taught that we cannot understand the Hebrew conjugations in the light
of the Norwegian tense system, and that Biblical Hebrew is very
different from his or her mother tongue.
In my Hebrew lessons my students learn to read Biblical Hebrew in the
way we find in the Masoretic text, and they also learn to transcribe
what they read. This means that our focus is on the written Masoretic
text and not on a different kind of spoken Hebrew. So again, what is
the advantage of "learning Hebrew in a spoken BH classroom," and
what is the relation between this "spoken BH Hebrew" and the
Masoretic pronunciation of Hebrew?
Best regards,
Rolf Furuli Ph.D
University of Oslo
>A survey question.
>
>How many on this list are learning Biblical Hebrew in a spoken BH classroom?
>
>If not, is this because
>
>1. a belief that non-spoken methods are more efficient.
>
>2. for practical reasons, a spoken BH class is not available for you.
>
>3. a belief that BH is special/dead and shouldn't be spoken as a
>class language.
>
>Thank you for your responses.
>Randall
>
>--
>Randall Buth, PhD
>www.biblicalulpan.org
>randallbuth at gmail.com
>Biblical Language Center
>Learn Easily - Progress Further - Remember for Life
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