Skip to Content.
Sympa Menu

b-hebrew - Re: [b-hebrew] 998 non-past wyyqtl's, Dave

b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org

Subject: Biblical Hebrew Forum

List archive

Chronological Thread  
  • From: "B. M. Rocine" <brocine AT twcny.rr.com>
  • To: <b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] 998 non-past wyyqtl's, Dave
  • Date: Wed, 1 Dec 2004 17:41:33 -0500

Hi Peter, You win on creating analogies, yours is better.

I chose mine because of the alien watching through his telescope. He's analogous to us students of BH, trying, as an outside observer, to determine, not laws, but meanings of a code as people respond to the code behaviorally. He will do it just fine in this case because it's very rudimentary communication. Still, he will have to leave room in his explanations of the "language of New York roads" for the inevitable chaos.

Of course, BH is a much more complicated system. It may even be more than one system when viewed as dialects or an evolution. I would think that the more complicated the *behavior* system is, the more we should expect some chaotic behaviors.

Shalom,
Bryan

You wrote:

I'm not sure that I like this traffic laws analogy. Sure, it explains why people don't always follow the rules. But it also implies that there is some set of prescriptive rules of language which people consciously break. But there were no prescriptive rules in biblical times, which people could get in trouble for breaking. There was just a set of conventions.

Perhaps a better analogy would be that people don't go to weddings and funerals in jeans or to the beach in a tux, although it is nowhere written down that you mustn't. At least, usually they don't. If you find someone breaking such rules, there may be a good reason, or it may just be that someone is being eccentric, or doesn't understand the conventions. So you are wasting your time trying to find explanations for every last case. And if you go back to insisting that such social rules are meaningful (or semantic) only if there are no exceptions, you have to conclude that there are no meaningful rules.






Archive powered by MHonArc 2.6.24.

Top of Page