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  • From: "Karl Randolph" <kwrandolph AT email.com>
  • To: "Hebrew" <b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: RE: [b-hebrew] Ancient Language Acquisition
  • Date: Tue, 02 Mar 2004 16:58:05 -0500

Dear Philip:

This has two answers, depending on where one
wants to go with his studies. There are
advantages and disadvantages no matter which
side of the coin one chooses.

I personally have chosen the route of knowing
only Biblical Hebrew. Part of that was
unintended—I had little access to other
Semitic languages for many years, and part of
that was intentional—I wanted to react to the
language as closely as possible as would a
native speaker of Biblical Hebrew. Knowing
other Semitic languages would have made it
more difficult to achieve my second goal.

For example, I am a native speaker of English.
I also speak German and Norwegian, and have a
reading knowledge of French, all of which are
cognate languages of English. My use of
English is not pure, but influenced by those
cognate languages. Likewise, were I to study
cognate languages to Biblical Hebrew, like
modern Hebrew, Arabic or others, it would make
it harder to read Tanakh as I would not have
as clear an expectation of what I am reading
(something that is important to me, as I have
dyslexia, which I was able to overcome by
reading in context: not having a clear context
to look forward to makes it harder to read a
text).

Yigal mentioned that knowing cognate languages
helps in a scholarly analysis of a language,
further there is much literature published in
modern Hebrew concerning the Biblical times,
its archeology and language, much of which is
never translated to English.

My conclusion is that there are advantages and
disadvantages to either route, and what you
plan to do with your study of Biblical Hebrew
should end up as a guide as to which route to
take.

Karl W. Randolph.


----- Original Message -----
From: "A. Philip Brown II" <pbrown AT GBS.EDU>

> Trevor Peterson wrote:
> Incidentally, I would be curious along the lines of this thread to know
> what people think about the notion that a person ought to learn Modern
> Israeli Hebrew or spoken Arabic first, before learning ancient Semitic
> languages. The potential disadvantage is that modern speakers sometimes
> assume too much continuity between their language and the ancient forms;
> but if it were done deliberately, I think this hazard could be easily
> avoided
> --------
> I had two years of modern Hebrew as a 7th and 9th grader, long before
> tackling BH in grad school. Although I did not achieve fluency in those two
> years, I was a good ways ahead of my fellow grad students. Getting used to
> some of the major grammatical differences between MH and BH took a little
> while, but the overall 'feel' for the language I had acquired more than made
> up for this.
>
> My one hesitation regarding Modern Hebrew study is that some who teach it
> appear to think this is little to no difference between MH and BH. Such an
> inaccurate assessment of the languages does a disservice to students of BH.
>
> Philip Brown
> GBS, Cincinnati, OH
--
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