Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Bryan Rocine" <brocine AT earthlink.net>]

Dear Randy,

no.  like this:  whatis? aword    ;-)

As usual, your points are important and well-taken.
Nevertheless, the learn-by-frequency concept seems very
efficient, especially when the corpus the student is aiming
to read is so limited and fixed as the Hebrew Bible.

This very limited aim, to read one book, is a powerful
control on pedagogy, IMO.

Can
you design for us a vocabulary list that is arranged by
*Biblical* frequency that is also linguistically more sound
than extant lists
(write it in your spare time  ;-)  maybe we could
collaborate with our spare time!  oy veh veh!  ;-)  )?  Or
do I understand you correctly when I predict that you would
not teach beginning students from memorization lists because
it is not "natural"?

Students of BH are not children learning their first
language.  Neither are they immersed in a BH-speaking
culture in which they will have to/want to live with the
language.  Additionally, they are typically fairly
well-educated adults with a considerable aptitude for
talking *about* language.  The limited goals for training in
BH and the background/educatability in linguistics of the
student body make the available frequency lists good
teaching tools.  Teachers can explain enough about the
"real" nature of BH to protect their students from a
"fictive" BH.


> is a root a word, a verb,
> or is a formed verb a word, but root isn't?
>

It shouldn't be too hard to keep the concepts seperate and
properly related.

shalom,
Bryan


B. M. Rocine
Associate Pastor
Living Word Church
6101 Court St. Rd.
Syracuse, NY 13206

(office) 315.437.6744
(home) 315.479.8267