Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Randall Buth <ButhFam AT compuserve.com>]

shalom Liz, 
>Interesting!
>People said I should have said bmiqom.
>I don't see how I was offering any fewer textual
>cues than the sentence you quoted.
>Actually, the sentence you quote uses taHat in the
>same way as the biblical usage when one king replaced 
>another. It refers to actions that have taken place in the past,
>or have been decided in the past.
>Is that correct, does the word require this type of usage?
>Thanks for your post.<

The newspaper quote is actually within a non-indicative clause about what 
should/would/could happen "to request  ...   A    taHat   B ". 
With language use one needs to consider the effect of register and
hesistation. 
The plain vanilla would be "bimqom-" 'instead of'. 
taHat is more formal in modern 
Hebrew than it would have been in biblical, by virtue of other idioms being
more 
common. 
If a speaker is hesitant and the speaker does not use the 'plain vanilla' 
structure, the listener sometimes goes looking, unconsciously, for some
other 
meaning than the more literary substitute for the plain vanilla. In your
case the waiter
obviously wanted to include a possible meaning "beside", "in addition to".
Not because 
taHat means that, but perhaps because he assumed you were also looking for 
something other than "instead of", since you hadn't used the expected
"instead of". 
Such is language use in the real world. 
This illustrates how meaning can function within 
semantic domains.

blessings,

Randall Buth
Jerusalem