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b-hebrew - RE: b-hebrew digest: November 12, 2001

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Subject: Biblical Hebrew Forum

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  • From: "Lisbeth S. Fried" <lizfried AT umich.edu>
  • To: "Biblical Hebrew" <b-hebrew AT franklin.oit.unc.edu>
  • Subject: RE: b-hebrew digest: November 12, 2001
  • Date: Tue, 13 Nov 2001 15:08:25 -0500



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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