Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Dan Wagner <Dan.Wagner AT dstm.com>]

Martin correctly says, "I just do not think that there is much value in
raising grammatical gender to the level of ontology."

James Barr has a good discussion of this in _The Semantics of Biblical
Language_.

Dan Wagner

-----Original Message-----
From: Martin Badenhorst [mailto:badenhorst AT op.org]
Sent: Tuesday, November 21, 2000 10:43
To: Biblical Hebrew
Subject: Re: . . . exegesis per ELOHIM as a female noun:


I'm sorry if it appears that I am raining on the parade, but I just do not
think that there is much value in raising grammatical gender to the level of
ontology.

Certainly, in some simple cases grammatical gender reflects actual physical
sexual characteristics, but in most cases it does not and irrelevant to the
"true nature" of the object. Objects like tables change gender over various
languages and to try and predicate some sort of ontology from an accident of
human language is taking a bold leap.

I speak languages which have no concept of grammatical gender at all (which
even English still has to a minimal degree), these languages (one each of
the two Southern Sintu families of Africa) have class system in their nouns
so that even all pronouns reflect class and not gender, the class system
more closely reflects ontology since the general classes of human, animal,
object, tool, abstract can describe the nature of something in that class
(eg. the morpheme 'zulu' in isiZulu has to do with beinge elevated or raised
up - thus the tribe are the amaZulu (zulu + human class plural concord), who
live in kwaZulu (zulu + locative concord) and speak isiZulu (zulu + abstract
class concord) and would hope end up in phezulu (zulu + superlative),
likewise the Basotho live in Lesotho and speak Sesotho). However, in these
languages euphony has taken a toll, especially with loanwords and human
beings may have the class markers of other classes since the sound of the
whole also plays a role. Off the top of my head I would imagine that it is
euphony that plays a major role in the grammatical gender of a noun and not
the percieved sex of a thing.

Martin

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Martin Badenhorst OP
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Boethius



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