Biblical Hebrew Forum

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

Peter wrote:
> Yes, but what makes you think that Hebrew is any less of a mixture of 
> different influences, or any other real human language for that 
> matter? I guess that the ones which are not a mixture are either 
> artificial or have had artificial rules imposed on them by grammarians 
> and stylists. Maybe languages spoken on isolated islands have 
> preserved more purity of some sort. Hebrew does not fit these special 
> cases, though there may have been rather artificial conventions in use 
> for particular styles.

Oh, come on.  Do you really believe that Hebrew (especially pre-
exilic) underwent the massive changes and rapid flux that English 
has in the past 100 years or so?  The means weren't there.  Sure, 
there may have been some borrowings, admixtures etc., but 
English as it currently stands is built on those very things.  Hebrew 
wasn't, and our corpus suggests that the language stayed 
remarkably stable for at least several hundred years.  That puts it 
in sharp contrast to English, which changes virtually daily and has 
for this entire century.  Even the changes we see between the pre-
exilic materials and the clearly post-exilic books like Chronicles 
are extremely minor when compared to what has happened to 
English.  The impact that the Exile had on the Hebrew language 
was actually fairly small, remarkably enough; contrast that with 
what happened to English after 1066.  For these reasons, it seems 
to me that a language such as Hebrew is a much better foundation 
on which to build a theory than a mish-mash such as English.

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