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  • From: dwashbur AT nyx.net
  • To: b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] BH verbal system
  • Date: Sun, 31 Jan 2010 12:34:47 -0800

No, I'm not imagining any such thing. However, if we're going to try and
categorize
homonymous forms in a slumgullian language like English, we have to think
diachronically
as well as synchronically. I don't see your approach doing this.

However, since we're talking about English and this list is about Hebrew, we
probably
should desist now...

On 31 Jan 2010 at 20:32, James Christian wrote:

>
> I think the problem here is that you are imagining English as a dead
> language with no
> informants. If we were to analyse a corpus of English as a dead
> language with no informants
> then we would come to the conclusion that neither tense nor aspect
> is grammaticalised in the
> verb form. The fact that we analyse the modern language as
> informants and can categorise the
> homonyms shows that our perceptions treat the usages so differently
> that we feel fine saying that
> they are different words. Perhaps we could argue the case that this
> was so if it were 1 verb out of
> a million where we saw this phenomenon. But we don't. We see it
> consistently with all verbs. We
> are clearly seeing a number of distinct functions mapping onto the
> same form. When we are
> faced with the task of translation it is the function rather than
> the form which dominates whether
> a translation will be high quality or sub-standard. In a round about
> kind of way I could agree with
> your analysis of calling the different uses of past inflected
> English verb forms as homonyms but
> then that would only inspire the question 'So, how do we know how
> many homonyms the B-
> Hebrew verb forms represent' and so we eventually get back to the
> same problem whether we
> analyse the different uses as homonyms or not. That is to say the
> problem of mapping the form
> onto its function and therefore how to best go about choosing the
> most natural translation in a
> target language.
> James Christian
>
> 2010/1/31 <dwashbur AT nyx.net>
>
>
> On 31 Jan 2010 at 19:59, James Christian wrote:
>
> >
> > Hi David, but as you yourself said 'the forms are identical'.
> We
> > call it a subjunctive when we have
> > certain pragmatic clues (e.g. clause starts with 'if') and
> when the
> > forms are used with a 'past'
> > function we call them 'past simple'. And yet there are no
> different
> > forms to analyse. Other than
> > contextual clues they are completely identical and so we have
> to
> > analyse the form rather than
> > our perceptions of its uses.
>
> Not at all. We understand that they are homonyms. In English the two
> forms melded into a
> single visual/auditory string; the qualifier "if" is our cue that we
> have one homonym and not
> the other. They are not the same "word" (however that term is
> defined) distinguished only
> by "certain pragmatic clues." I agree that BH didn't grammaticalize
> either tense or aspect (I
> extend this to the notion of "sequence," but that's another topic)
> but you have not shown this
> for English. That's my only quibble.
>
> Dave Washburn
>
> http://www.nyx.net/~dwashbur
> _______________________________________________
> b-hebrew mailing list
> b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org
> http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/b-hebrew
>
>
>


Dave Washburn

http://www.nyx.net/~dwashbur




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