Biblical Hebrew Forum

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

Ok, I found my paper. It's pretty interesting.
Tho I don't understand very much of it.
I assume I understood it at the time (about 10 years ago).
You have to be up on Chomskian jargon to really get it I think.
OK, now what do I do with it?
I wrote it for a prof, a Chomsky clone, as I said, who didn't
speak a word of Hebrew. I gave a brief description of the seven
binyanim which you would give to a beginning Hebrew student.
I give them greater nuance later in the paper.
I didn't bother with the correct transliteration, I just
wrote the Hebrew so he could understand it.

I would be interested in comments. I was hoping to publish it
at the time, but neither of us knew whether it was right, or where
to send it. Now I have even less an idea.
The paper is entitled "Lack of Subject/Object Asymmetry in Biblical Hebrew."
If people would like to look at it, I can send it as an attachment.

Liz

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Henry Churchyard [mailto:churchh AT crossmyt.com]
> Sent: Wed, November 14, 2001 10:02 PM
> To: Biblical Hebrew
> Subject: Hebrew basic/"deep" word-order (was: b-hebrew digest: November
> 13, 2001)
>
>
> >>> Hebrew word order is (usually) V-S-O. Verb, subject, object.
> >>> Greek word order is (usually) S-O-V, Subject, object, verb.
>
> >> From: Dave Washburn [mailto:dwashbur AT nyx.net]
> >> Sent: Tue, November 13, 2001 2:21 PM
>
> >> 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.
>
> > From: "Lisbeth S. Fried" <lizfried AT umich.edu>
>
> > 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.)
>
> I didn't get too far into syntax, but I know that some theories
> have problems with a fundamental or "deep" VSO word order,
> because V-O is usually considered to be a constituent, while
> V-S and S-O aren't usually considered to be hierarchical
> constituents.
>
> --
> Henry Churchyard   churchh AT crossmyt.com   http://www.crossmyt.com/hc/
>
>
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