Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Rolf Furuli <furuli AT online.no>]

Bryan Rocine wrote:



>At 12:55 AM 3/22/99 +0200, Rolf Furuli wrote:
>>
>>On the basis of the results of psykholinguistics, it can be shown that
>>meaning is connected with concepts in the minds of living people and not
>>with words uttered or written. Each written word is a semantic signal of a
>>particular concept in the minds of people speaking the same language and
>>having the same presupposition pool. Such concepts have a core meaning but
>>they become more fuzzy as their edges are approached.
>
>I don't buy it! ...unless you admit that *fly* meaning insect is a different
>word than *fly* meaning zipper is a different word than *fly* meaning
>tarpoline, etc.  I.e., all these *fly*s just happen to be homonyms, maybe
>with a shared derivation and maybe not.  And if they are indeed several
>words which happen to be homonymous, what help is your idea that a word has
>a single core meaning?  What's the difference between your idea and the idea
>that one word has several meanings?
>

Dear Bryan,

You should not reject an idea before you are fully aquainted with it. There
are no problems with homonyms.
Psykholingiustics study persons with brain damage, speech disorders, slips
of the tongue of normal persons and use different experiments inside the
frame of theoretical linguistics. Based on this, several quite certain
conclusions can be drawn. One conclusion is that concepts signalled by
words are stored in the mind in different systems such as word classes (a
slip of the tongue has almost always the same word class as the right
word), coordination (salt-pepper-mustard), collocation (salt and water),
subordination (colours, red blue, green), and synonomy (hungry-starved) -
to mention some of the systems.

To be able to use a word, we must know three things: the meaning of the
concept behind it, what it sounds like, and how it can be used in
sentences. Applying this to "fly", "fly", and "fly", we see that only one
of the three factors tends to confuse the words - how the words sounds. The
two others will distinguish the three meanings. So there is no problem for
people with a modern English presupposition pool to have three different
concepts "fly" stored in the mind. But the Hebrew presupposition pool had
only one concept for nepe$.

The important point, however, is that meaning is connected with concepts in
the minds of living people and not with words in a book (cf. de Saussure's
differenciation between "langue" and  "parole"). The modern theory of
functional equivalence is extremely "undemocratic", as it were. Almost all
the power has been taken away from the readers  and transferred to the
translators. To bolster this concentration of power, the theory has been
constructed that words/concepts have no meaning apart from a context. And
who can find the meaning by help of the context? Only the translators! So
there are few if any controls that the readers can use to check the quality
of the translation, but they are at the mercy of the translators.

I do not doubt the motives, sincerity and skill of translators. I just
point out that the translation model has several disadvantages, and the
looser is the reader. In most cases the use of the "dictatorial powers" of
the translators does not affect the readers in a negative way. But in all
the modern idiomatic translations we find that theological ideas are read
into the text without having a sound linguistic foundation. In this
situation, it is important to understand the meaning of meaning.

As an introduction to psykholinguistics I recommend Jean Aitchison, 1989,
The Articulate Mammal: An Introduction to Psykholinguistics", and 1993,
"Words in the Mind: An Introduction to the Mental Lexicon."
As an application to Biblical words and translation, I recommend my own book.



Regards
Rolf



Rolf Furuli
Lecturer in Semitic languages
University of Oslo