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  • From: Shoshanna Walker <rosewalk AT concentric.net>
  • To: b-hebrew <b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] Speaking only for myself ...
  • Date: Fri, 27 Jun 2008 18:44:44 -0400

What bothers me about this list, is that many of the great Rabbinical commentators were Biblical Hebrew linguists, however they are never cited here, except when I used to bother, and their teachings, which solve a great number of quandaries, when I cited them, were dismissed anyway. The impression is that, although this is a Bibilical Hebrew list, the list is not interested in the linguists who were connected to our Oral Torah tradition, even though they WERE linguists.

Shoshanna




Dear John Linebarger:
On Wed, Jun 25, 2008 at 12:16 PM, John M. Linebarger <jmlineb AT comcast.net>
wrote:

I am a lurker on b-hebrew but more active on b-greek, and I am struck by
the difference between the two groups. There is much more controversy on
b-hebrew,’Ķ


One of the things that attracted me to the study of Biblical Hebrew, already
back in my college days, was the realization that a lot less is known of the
language than of Greek, for example. One of the results of less being known
of the language is that there is more controversy between different
understandings of the language with less likelihood that the differences be
resolved.


’Ķwhich is not necessarily positive or interesting.’Ķ


Can be, but you're right, too often it is not.


’Ķ The most recent exchange between Isaac Fried and David Kummerow is a case
in point.

Quite frankly, speaking only for myself, what I find tedious is Isaac's
persistent refusal either to study linguistics or to accept its results as
being normative for that discipline. Isaac appears to wish that lingistics
was much more like mathematics, but it is not. So he appears to fight it
instead of accepting it and working within it. As a result, what he puts
forward often appears to be gibberish to the linguistics community. If the
goal is to change the field of linguistics, a prerequisite would appear to
be both an understanding of it and a willingness to use its medium of
discourse to communicate the need for change.

My biggest problem with his theories is that too often he is wrong. But
like so many such ideologues, he just blows off the criticism and soldiers
on.


My humble request is that unprofitable exchanges like this latest one
either be minimized or eliminated in future. A ground rule for posting
would appear to be a willingness to express oneself in commonly accepted
terms of discourse in the linguistic community. Failure to do that is
simply a conscious choice not to be understood, which dooms the
communication to be ineffective at the start.

The problem is, where do you draw the line?

The way I personally deal with it is to skip Isaac's postings when I come
across them, putting them in the electronic round file unread. The way I
deal with messages from Jim Stinehart is to leave them in the in box a
couple of days, then when I round file them, they go with their accumulated
responses unread.

The problems for a list leader (sorry, the proper term escapes me at the
moment) is different from my personal solution. How is he to choose which
people to post, and which to forbid? By formal scholarship? If by formal
scholarship, he would have to deny me, as I have all of one year (two
semesters) of one class in Hebrew. Yet I have read the text of the
Tanakh/Old Testament through several times and in the process wrote a
dictionary from Biblical Hebrew to English, which few, if any, PhDs in
Hebrew have done. I do not envy their job.


John M. Linebarger
PhD Computer Science (so Hebrew and linguistics are avocations, not
vocations)
Albuquerque, NM


Karl W. Randolph.
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