Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Dave Washburn" <dwashbur AT nyx.net>]

Paul wrote:
> Dave Washburn wrote:
> 
> > This is a very good analogy.  Another that comes to my mind is the
> > idea that discourse attempts to build a skyscraper from the top
> > down, instead of laying the foundation first so there's something to
> > build on.
> 
> Dave,
> 
> I think you have unwittingly hit upon the reason why these type discussions 
> keep
> extending on with no end in sight.  I personally do not approach BH in 
> order to "build
> a skyscraper."
> 
> As a trained engineer who job at times past has been to analyze existing 
> systems and
> figure out "how they tick," I realize that the job of that type analysis is 
> completely
> different from the job of design or construction.  All the ones that I know 
> who do the
> analysis job look first at the largest unit, break it down into major 
> components, and
> then continue analyzing and *breaking* down until the various processes are
> understood.  I simply am never planning on generating new biblical hebrew!

Nor am I, but I am very interested in understanding the 
mechanisms that generated the biblical Hebrew that we have.  
Having examined both the top-down and bottom-up approaches 
(i.e. discourse and clause-level), I have concluded that the 
skyscraper approach is more likely to give me the answers than 
the reverse-engineering approach.  In a sense I'm still doing some 
reverse-engineering, because I don't have a native speaker, but the 
starting point of my investigation is at the smaller unit rather than 
the larger because I'm looking for unifying factors in syntactic 
usage, where the discourser may not necessarily see a need for 
that.  So I suspect you're right that the two opposite approaches 
are why we are not likely to resolve anything.  We're talking about 
almost totally different methodologies.

> Please realize that this is not the approach that I use with Ibanag, the 
> language
> *into which* I am translating.  There I very much have to start from bottom 
> up,
> finding the correct words, the correct clause level forms, and the correct 
> discourse
> features to result in the closest reconstruction that I can manage to the 
> original
> text that I analyzed.

So why couldn't you use this approach for Hebrew?  That's the part 
I'm not understanding so far.



Dave Washburn
http://www.nyx.net/~dwashbur
A Bible that's falling apart means a life that isn't.