Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Daniel Wagner" <dan.wagner AT netzero.net>]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: <Numberup AT worldnet.att.net>
To: Biblical Hebrew <b-hebrew AT franklin.oit.unc.edu>
Cc: Biblical Hebrew <b-hebrew AT franklin.oit.unc.edu>
Sent: Thursday, May 10, 2001 3:37 PM
Subject: Re: A new tack on 'asher


> "Subordination" has several meanings, and how does this 
> affect a precise translation? 

Solomon,

I think Clay Bartholomew's response to the rest of your post was helpful, but 
i wanted to say something about your initial comment above:  

When i used the term "precise" what i mean is that the narrowness or 
broadness (which you reference, i.e., "several meanings" of subordination) of 
the Hebrew _)a$ER_ is equivalent with our the grammatical concept of 
"subordination" in English. Thus, i'm not entering into a discussion of 
translation at this point, but still on the level of grammatical analysis. So 
yes, i'll grant you that _)ASHER_ functions in more than one way as a "sign 
of subordination", but that is precisely my point. No other English 
grammatical description is precisely as broad, nor as narrow, as "sign of 
subordination."

To be specific, "nominalizer" (Anderson? cited by Dave Washburn) is a bit too 
narrow in that it only applies to some contexts or at least does not indicate 
the full function of the term, and "relative pronoun" is likewise sometimes 
too specific or at least non-equivalent with its function. And worse are the 
mere English glosses that tell us almost *nothing* about the function of the 
word, such as "who" "what" "which" "where" as all these and others have been 
suggested for various contexts, and do in fact work in English frequently, 
but do not *define* the function of the Hebrew term _)ASHER_. In our context 
of Ex. 3:14, i believe it should be left untranslated, or else "translated" 
only by punctuation in written English.

Dan Wagner

> I think preferable is Koehler and Baumgartner's explanation (_A Bilingual 
> Dictionary of the Hebrew and Aramaic Old Testament_, Brill, 1998): 
> "_)asher_ marks the connexion of two independent clauses of which the
> second explains more distinctly a part of the first."
> 
> Solomon Landers
> 
> Daniel Wagner wrote:
> 
> > In defining a word, we need to not merely find a bunch of possible 
> > glosses that work in a target language, and then plug in whichever one 
> > seems appropriate when translating a particular given passage, but rather 
> > we seek to determine a word's function in the original language.
> >
> > Thus, what's wrong with taking _)asher_ generally as the "sign of 
> > subordination"? That works in *all* contexts. It's not a relative 
> > pronoun, and it has no *intrinsic* translatable meaning such as "what" 
> > "where" or anything like that. All it does as a "function word" is to 
> > indicate subordination.
> > *********************
> 
> 
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