Biblical Hebrew Forum

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

B-Haverim,

Read Chaucer, Pope, Shakespeare, Frost, Milton, Donne, Shelly, Coleridge,
Wordsworth, Elliot(you get the idea)--from saint to rebel, from England to
America, from realist to transcendentalist, it's all grammatically flawless
English.  If poetry is not grammatical it is not intelligible.  The skill
of the poet is that he plays his game *within* the boundaries.  Yes,
English poetry is written in English.  I will admit that we may find some
examples here and there of Twentieth Century English poems that are not
grammatical, but what are we to expect from the age of paint-splashers and
jazz(both of which are interesting to me)?  Do we think such abstraction
was the ideal of the Biblical culture?  

I am not asserting that BH poetry is a more natural or colloquial BH per
se, although I have thrown out the idea for consideration on this list.  I
still think it's worth toying with the idea for fun.  What I do notice is
that the distribution of verb forms and clause structures is more regular
in BH prose than poetry.  I also note that the Hebrews were unusual in the
ANE in their using prose for a national literature.  It makes me suspect
that BH prose could be a literary dialect with fairly rigorous constraints.
 The prose has a rather grand and majestic rhythm to me that I do not find
jives with my sense of the colloquial.  I can add cross-cultural evidence: 
most good third-person prose narratives in English are *not* colloquial in
stylistics/pragmatics.  Remember that elementary school teacher that told
you to "just write the way you speak"?  The good writers of English third
person prose narrative never listened to her.

Peter, I think your suggestion to look for the semantics of the BH verb
forms in direct speech makes sense.  In the end, though, we have to look at
all the text we have, partly because we have so little text.  We only see
part of a language in the Tanak.  One of these days I would like to post to
the b-hebrew for discussion the test sentences I would put before a native
speaker of BH if only the Lord could raise one up so I could sit with him
for an hour and he could label sentences tov o lo tov.  I would want around
half of the test sentences to go probing for what is lo tov, right?   That
so that we could pin down the limits of this language.  What sentences
would you put before him?  

HTH

Shalom,
Bryan

----------
> From: Dave Washburn <dwashbur AT nyx.net>
> To: Biblical Hebrew <b-hebrew AT franklin.oit.unc.edu>
> Subject: Re: Re[6]: ex 26 + 36.8ff, (36.29)
> Date: Thursday, January 28, 1999 11:59 AM
> 
> Peter,
> > 
> > Thank you, Bryan.
> > 
> > I am concerned about your argument that poetry is a more basic form of 
> > the language than prose - if that is what you are saying. I think the 
> > opposite is more likely to be true, at least by analogy with other 
> > languages e.g. Azerbaijani which I am studying. True, prose styles can 
> > be artificial with special conventions not used in normal speech. But 
> > also poetry can be very artificial; it can be archaising; and it also 
> > be very free e.g. in choosing words for their sound rather than for 
> > their strict grammatical suitability. The last point may be why it is 
> > actually very difficult to reconstruct the TAM system of Hebrew from 
> > poetry - because the poets simply used the verb form which sounded 
> > best, regardless of whether it normally had an uncancellable tense or 
> > aspect property which contradicted the sense of the poem.
> 
> THANK YOU for pointing this out.  I've been wondering about 
> Bryan's statements re poetry as well, but haven't had a chance to 
> respond.  In every language I've studied, not the least of which is 
> English, poetry does its own thing and doesn't give a rip about 
> grammaticality.  The word-picture takes precedence and makes its 
> own rules.  An excellent treatment of this is Timothy R. Austin, 
> "Language Crafted: A Linguistic Theory of Poetic Syntax" 
> published by Indiana U.  I don't think we can base any ideas about 
> grammar on poetry.
> 
> > So where can we look to avoid artificial prose styles and poetic 
> > styles which are both artificial and free? I would suggest looking at 
> > direct speech - not long set pieces but those small conversational 
> > speeches which are common in the historical books. There we may find 
> > something more like the natural language of the Israelites of the 
> > period of writing.
> 
> Possibly, though even there we may encounter artificially crafted 
> material, such as the speeches in Job; we also may run into 
> dialectical matters (witness the shibboleth story).  My approach is 
> to look to various and sundry types of prose and try to figure out 
> what grammatical threads tie them together.
> 
> 
> Dave Washburn
> http://www.nyx.net/~dwashbur
> A Bible that's falling apart means a life that isn't.
> 
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