Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Bryan Rocine" <596547 AT ican.net>]

Hi Matthew.  
----------
> From: Matthew Anstey <manstey AT portal.ca>
> To: Biblical Hebrew <b-hebrew AT franklin.oit.unc.edu>
> Subject: Discourse Analysis in general
> Date: Wednesday, December 02, 1998 3:38 PM


> Linguistic description helps enourmously at certain points, but does it
ever
> help one "feel" a language? So, some questions:
>       1. how can one best be immersed in a dead language?

why would you want to be?  ;-)  i'm only half joking.  the HBible is not
going to run away from you like a person on the street when you try to talk
to it in BH.  the text will sit
right there in your lap while you muse over it.  we want to have a lot of
theory for help.  as far as vocabulary and parsing morphology, right--the
less you have to think about this stuff the better.  it's better if words
just mean what they mean than have to speak to you through a middle-man
called paradigms.  that takes nothing short of rigorous, very fast drill,
like they run students through in the U.S. foreign service courses.

>       2. how can one best teach others in this way?

learning Modern Hebrew scares me a bit.  Indo-Europeans grabbed ahold of
studies of BH, a non-I-E language, some hundreds of years ago, and we're
still trying to recover from their forcing BH into an IE mold.  Modern
Hebrew, as a language, is highly influenced by I-Es.  is there more to gain
or more to lose?  i think the answer depends somewhat on the answerer's
perception of the human aptitude.  can someone who has experienced the
powerful conditioning necessary to gain fluency in Mod  H able to avoid
allowing that conditioning to corrupt his understanding of BH, in some ways
quite a distinct dialect?  i doubt my own ability to do so.  on the plus
side, some of our friends on the list who became fluent in Mod. H after
studying BH sing "free at last, free at last, thank HaShem I'm free at
last!"  they no longer even think about many aspects of morphology. 
hopefully, they are free to think about other bigger things.

>       3. at what point does one move to linguistic description, particularly
> discourse analysis stuff and how?

year one, lesson one with the right first year book.  btw, thanx again,
Paul.


Shalom,
Bryan