Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Peter_Kirk AT SIL.ORG]

To you, Dave, your daughter's sentences seem ill-formed, because you 
are not a speaker of her dialect. To her friends, her sentences are 
well-formed, but perhaps yours are not. If your daughter changes to 
speak a dialect closer to yours, it will probably be because of 
pressure to study well, get a good job etc for which a particular 
dialect of English is required. The same would be true, in England at 
least, of someone with a strong regional accent; they would have to 
conform more closely to a certain standard to get on well in life. 
Another way to put it is that your dialect is the prestige dialect, 
and your daughter's is not. If she goes for a low status job in an 
inner city area (I guess you hope not!) her dialect will change less, 
or differently. Someone said a language is a dialect with an army; 
perhaps rather it is one with universities and corporations.

We must be careful before reading this type of generation gap 
situation back into ancient Hebrew, of course. But perhaps the Tel Dan 
inscription would illustrate my point: is it a corrupt form of Aramaic 
as some seem to suggest, or is it the perfectly good standard language 
of that people at that time? Or how about the odd Hebrew of Job? I 
just don't think we know enough to start identifying certain types of 
language as in error rather than as representative of a different 
dialect.

Peter Kirk