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  • From: Peter Kirk <peterkirk AT qaya.org>
  • To: "Christopher V. Kimball" <mail AT cvkimball.com>
  • Cc: b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] Review of Alter's Translation
  • Date: Wed, 27 Oct 2004 17:13:28 +0100

On 27/10/2004 16:54, Christopher V. Kimball wrote:


I've read the review and was struck by the following assertion attributed
to Sáenz-Badillos:

(The vernacular vocabulary, according to the Spanish Hebrew scholar Angel Sáenz-Badillos, must have exceeded the Bible’s—a lexicon “so restricted that it is hard to believe it could have served all the purposes of quotidian existence in a highly developed society.”)

Is the vocabulary too restricted for daily life in 6-th century BCE? Is it restricted compared to other documents of the same period?

If the vocabulary is restricted, it is surely only because the subject matter is restricted. For eaxmple, there is no recorded word for "cat", but that is not because this word was somehow excluded from a restricted subset of Hebrew which biblical authors were permitted to use, it was simply because none of the biblical authors happened to need to refer to cats. If they had needed to refer to them, or to any other features of daily life which don't happen to be recorded in the Bible, they would surely have used the appropriate commonly used words.

Anyway, while it is hard to make cross-language comparisons, it seems to me that a lexicon of more than 8000 words (admittedly perhaps one third of these are proper names) is not really all that restricted.

--
Peter Kirk
peter AT qaya.org (personal)
peterkirk AT qaya.org (work)
http://www.qaya.org/





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