Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Lisbeth S. Fried" <lizfried AT umich.edu>]

Hi,
I took a couple of classes in my graduate student days in
linguistics at UM with a fellow who studied at 
MIT with Chomsky and indeed was a Chomsky clone.
He was of the opinion, and taught, that every language
was at its base SVO. He had a slew of proofs.
I wrote a paper taking each one of the proofs of SVO and
showed that biblical Hebrew was VSO at its core.
(Someone else showed it for Welsh.)

Liz

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Dave Washburn [mailto:dwashbur AT nyx.net]
> Sent: Tue, November 13, 2001 2:21 PM
> To: Biblical Hebrew
> Subject: RE: b-hebrew digest: November 12, 2001
> 
> 
> > Hebrew word order is (usually) V-S-O. Verb, subject, object.
> > Greek word order is (usually) S-O-V, Subject, object, verb. 
> 
> Well, maybe and maybe not, particularly for Hebrew.  The main 
> reason that it is often asserted that Hebrew order is VSO is 
> because of the predominance of the wayyiqtol form in the Bible.  
> This does not mean, however, that VSO was the "normal" word 
> order in conversational classical hebrew was VSO, merely that in 
> narrative prose that's the order we have preserved most often.  My 
> own view is that the wayyiqtol is the result of a transformation that 
> moves the verb to first position from a "base" SVO order.  But 
> that's just my view.
> 
> Dave Washburn
> http://www.nyx.net/~dwashbur
> This time, like all times, is a very good one if we but know what 
> to do with it.
>                   -Emerson
> 
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