Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Peter Kirk" <Peter_Kirk AT sil.org>]

I agree with Charles' reply to the following. Someone once said that "a
language is a dialect with an army", or one might say with a nation state.
It is indeed this type of sociolinguistic factor which makes Danish a
language and not a regional dialect of Swedish, whereas Scots is considered
by most (here in England at least) as a dialect of English. Well, the
Hebrews had their own nation state and army, during the monarchy (if this is
not entirely legendary!) and during the Hasmonean period. So that is enough
for their variety of Canaanite to be counted as a separate language, of (one
variety of) which we see a limited sample in the Hebrew Bible.

Peter Kirk

----- Original Message -----
From: Niels Peter Lemche <npl AT teol.ku.dk>
To: Biblical Hebrew <b-hebrew AT franklin.oit.unc.edu>
Sent: Thursday, June 22, 2000 7:36 AM
Subject: RE: "Is Biblical Hebrew a Language?"


> To Jonathan,
>
> Well, if only Shakespeare. The English educated people will tell you about
> an amazingly collection of words in Shakespeare's works. I once heard
35.000
> but that cannot be true but Shakespeare's language abilities was far
beyond
> any other person I know of, so his example was probably not a very well
> chosen one.
>
> To Charles, who wrote:
>
> In my view, Ullendorf is almost certainly correct.  In fact, it may be
more
> appropriate to speak of biblical Hebrew as a dialect of Canaanite than as
a
> language proper.
>
> maybe a dialect for writing biblical literature?
>
> NP
>
>
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