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b-hebrew - Re: Re[2]: wayyiqtol vs. English

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  • From: "Dave Washburn" <dwashbur AT nyx.net>
  • To: b-hebrew AT franklin.oit.unc.edu
  • Subject: Re: Re[2]: wayyiqtol vs. English
  • Date: Thu, 4 Mar 1999 07:48:41 -0700


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.




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