Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Peter_Kirk AT SIL.ORG]

Yes, TH (that helps). If the Lord doesn't miraculously raise up a 
native speaker, I guess you could do a lot worse than ask someone like 
Al Silberman. But, from what I was saying to Dave Washburn, surely we 
need to come up not with isolated sentences but whole discourses - 
especially to test such things as use of weqatal. Even I :-) fooled 
myself that "This morning I write a letter" was ungrammatical, until 
someone showed me a context in which it was OK.

Meanwhile, by all means try to come up with a grammar based on poetry. 
If it works, great! If it doesn't (as people have said in the past), 
then maybe the biblical poets are not so comparable with Shakespeare 
after all.

Peter Kirk


______________________________ Reply Separator 
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Subject: Poetry (was [6]: ex 26 + 36.8ff, (36.29))
Author:  596547 AT ican.net at internet
Date:    28/01/1999 20:47

<snip>

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
<snip>