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  • From: "George Athas" <gathas AT ausisp.com>
  • To: "B-HEBREW" <b-hebrew AT franklin.oit.unc.edu>
  • Subject: Re: direct vs indirect discourse
  • Date: Mon, 16 Jul 2001 23:39:27 +1000


| Dear Friends,
| Does biblical Hebrew have any grammatical or syntactical way of
| indicating direct versus indirect discourse? Cheers.
| Mike D.

Mike,

The inclusion of the infinitive construct of )MR with prepositional lamed
prefixed [ie,
Le)MoR] is your best marker of direct discourse. Quite often, Le)MoR is
translated as
"saying", but it can also be translated by English quotation marks (").

The conjunction KiY is usually a marker of indirect discourse.

However, these words do not necessarily have to be present in the text to
indicate direct
or indirect discourse. It's syntactical etiquette for them to be there, but
sometimes they
just simply aren't there and you have to go by context. That's usually a
matter of
observing the change in person. You get a lot more 2nd person verbs, pronouns
and suffixes
in direct discourse than you do in indirect discourse (where you would expect
a lot more
3rd person verbs, pronouns and suffixes).


Best regards,

GEORGE ATHAS
(Sydney, Australia)
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  • direct vs indirect discourse, Michael DePangher, 07/13/2001
    • <Possible follow-up(s)>
    • Re: direct vs indirect discourse, George Athas, 07/16/2001

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