Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Peter_Kirk AT SIL.ORG]

Dear Dave,

Thank you for your answer. I must say you have a good point with the 
development of children's speech etc. Let me just take up one point. 
You wrote:

"So I'm suggesting that we need to answer more of the questions still 
pending about
the nature of individual clauses before our discourse analysis has a 
solid basis on which to stand.  We can attempt discourse analysis 
based on the current state of things, of course, but IMO the results 
are far from assured because we're building on assumptions as
much as anything else.  Does that help?"

Yes, it does help. But I wonder if we are expecting too much to get 
things right first at the low level. It looks as if we never will get 
an agreed firm foundation to build on (I guess they had similar 
problems building the tower of Babel!). So perhaps we should look on 
discourse analysis not as a fancy decoration which might be top-heavy 
on a weak foundation, but rather as a buttress to keep our shaky 
building standing firm. Less metaphorically, we can try to use 
discourse analysis to test and refine our assumptions or hypotheses 
and make a firmer and better rounded model of the whole of b-hebrew.

Peter Kirk

PS to our other b-hebrew friends: Don't waste your E-mail bandwidth 
telling me that there never was a literal tower of Babel, this was 
intended as a rhetorical allusion.