Biblical Hebrew Forum

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

Harry, 
> Dear Dave (Washburn),
> 
> Greetings from Mississippi.
> 
> In this discussion of what is well formed or what is not I lean toward 
> Peter Kirk's view.  The decision of whose language is well formed and 
> whose is not can be a value laden judgment.  My brand of linguistics 
> tends to be more descriptive than prescriptive.  However, it would be 
> valid to report that John Doe's speech is different than the speech of 
> the majority of the members of community YYY.  It would also be valid to 
> report that the members of community YYY tend to view John Doe's speech 
> as non-normative, i.e., not well formed.  However, it would be possible 
> to write a grammar of John Doe's idiolect or if John Doe was a member of 
> a minority speech community in community YYY we could write a grammar of 
> John Doe's dialect.

Of course this is possible, and as I said before, I am making no 
value judgments.  At the same time, it seems to me that if we're 
going to write a grammar that doesn't include every conceivable 
idiolect (and hence doesn't end up being more pages than there are 
trees available to make paper to print them on), we have to have 
some plumblines of some sort.  This is especially critical with a 
language such as Hebrew, where we have a fairly small corpus and 
no native speakers to tell us what is or is not an idiolect or "good" 
Hebrew.  It's the same with English or any other language: we can't 
construct a grammar, especially a generative one, without some 
guidelines or intuitions about what is well-formed and what is not.  
Without a baseline of some kind, we're just spinning our wheels 
because we end up saying "this is the way it is except when 
somebody does something different, and hence anything goes."  
I'm not ready to throw in that towel (yet)...

> Even though I I hold this view I still find myself to be frustrated as I 
> study the Choctaw language.  I know two sisters who are only separated 
> by a few years who grew up in the same house who have some substantial 
> differences in their speech.  Each thinks that her own way of speaking 
> is correct and that the other's speech is not well formed. Since 
> literature is not well established there is no prestige or book Choctaw.  
> It makes my linguistic life interesting.

Sounds like you need a body of native speakers to either evaluate 
or give you a baseline to evaluate which of them speaks more 
"correctly."  At the same time, for the very reasons you and Peter 
have raised, I avoid the term "correct" or "grammatical."  The former 
in particular implies value judgment, and that's not my job.  My job 
is to determine what the majority of native speakers would have 
considered well-formed, i.e. in accordance with their native 
intuitions about clause formation in their language.

Does that clear up my POV?

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