Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Matthew Anstey" <manstey AT portal.ca>]

Gday Henry,

First abour ger ...

>Actually, I don't think that "sojourner" is necessarily all that
>obsolete, considering that its basic root noun "sojourn" is only a
>little bit literary, or belonging to a slightly out-of-date
>journalistic jargon, and so is not fully archaic -- in fact, "sojourn"
>is exactly the kind of word that writers for Time magazine a few
>decades back would have sprinkled in their prose to lend an air of
>distinction.
>
>Anyway, quite as important as achieving a smooth English style in
>translation is avoiding a dangerous pseudo-clarity which results from
>using words that have specific connotations which encourage readers to
>assume things which are not necessarily implied by (or even compatible
>with) the original text.  This can sometimes lead to difficult
>decisions.

True, but thankfully we are not producing a translation, just an
interlinear. The problem we have with "sojourner" is that many users of the
software will have English as a second/third language, and much of their
English comes from American media programs. I doubt whether many of these
users will understand "sojourner" or "alien" but "refugee" (which we won't
use by the way) I would think is very widely known, considering the times we
live in. Our emphasis in the program is on syntax more than lexical, but it
is interesting how much discussion arises over lexical choices.

Thanks for bearing with me on these pausal forms....

>That's the wrong question -- the Masoretes were only writing down the
>pronunciation they heard in formal cantillation/recitation of the text,
>and didn't consciously think about where to add in pausal forms; in
>fact, the whole development of the analysis of Hebrew grammar is mainly
>post-masoretic.

I'm clear on this bit now.

>>> In my dissertation ( http://ccwf.cc.utexas.edu/~churchyh/hc599dis.zip

I downloaded it and tried to read it, but it was too technical for me. I'll
give it another go when I have more time one day.

>>> ), I explore how the accentual system correlates with "minor pausal
>>> phonology" (stress-shift blocking) in detail, and it can be seen how
>>> such stress alternations arose from prosodic patterns which could
>>> naturally occur in speech, though they're a little fossilized in
>>> Masoretic.
>
>> So a natural language user would produce these stress alterations?
>> Is that what you mean?
>
>Yes.
>
>
>> So if I understand you correctly, at some stage when BH was still
>> spoken, users would naturally stress certain words?
>
>Would give greater prosodic prominence to words in certain positions
>within phrases, and such prosodic prominence could have effects on the
>other phonology of such words.

This is what I was trying to ascertain from the beginning, that the use of
pause was a phenomenon of spoken Hebrew at some stage, not just a phenomenon
of written Hebrew.

The BIG question then which I am slowly working towards, is: if a native BH
NLU in speaking gave "greater prosodic prominence to words in certain
positions within phrases, and such prosodic prominence could have effects on
the
other phonology of such words," then what is the relationship between these
pauses and the other linguistic features of BH? You have mentioned the
relationship between phonology and the orthographic accentual system, but
what other possible relationships exist of which we could have some
confidence in ascertaining given the MT?


>
>> If this is what you are saying, then can you inform me of how accurate
>> are the correlations between "prosodic patterns which could naturally
>> occur in speech" and the MT?  Thanks.
>
>That's kind of the wrong question again, but I discuss a related
>question (correlation between pausal phonology and the hierarchical
>immediate-constituent hierarchy of the masoretic orthographic accentual
>system) in my dissertation.

I'll look at this chapter again.


>> Vince:
>
>> what do you think are the syntactic and/or semantic and/or pragmatic
>> reasons that produce the "natural prosodic phenomena"?
>
>Syntactic etc. factors influence the hierarchy of phrasal prosodic
>constituents, and the phrasal phonology influences the distribution of
>pausal forms.  There's a whole extensive literature on the relationship
>between syntactic and prosodic constituency (Elisabeth Selkirk, etc.).

I've heard of Selkirk, something else to look up. Are you saying that your
dissertation demonstrates that the distribution of the pausal forms (and
accents perhaps?) is orderly enough to be able to help us understand the
behaviour of the phrasal prosodic constituents which in turn could shed
light on the syntactic factors co-determining this? Are we going top-down or
bottom-up here in our analysis, and can we do both? That is, what are the
implications for your findings for the understanding of the syntax of a NLU?
Am I making sense?

>
>
>>> in my derivations, pausal forms are basic and full; contextual forms
>>> are derived and reduced (that is, the opposite of received wisdom).
>
>> In a GB-grammar framework do you then see the 'deep' forms all in
>> pause with the 'surface' forms mostly phonologically transformed?
>
>It's actually not as boldly innovative as he thinks -- the idea that
>pausal stress represents the stress position which is initially-assigned
>during the course of the synchronic phonological derivation has been
>pretty much the standard assumption in all generative phonological
>analyses beginning with Prince (1975) -- just turn to p. 194 of your
>copy of "The Phonology and Morphology of Tiberian Hebrew" (MIT PhD,
>1975), and it's right there...   ;-)

I've heard of this before, and I'm wondering what would a FG analysis make
of this?

Thanks for your answers,

With regards,
Matthew Anstey