Biblical Hebrew Forum

[decaen AT chass.utoronto.ca (Vincent DeCaen)]

dear friends,

i've been extending my "minimalist" dialectology studies beyond the 
programmatic paper in JHS. i find the same picture repeatedly, and i feel 
emboldened to put together a monograph on the method of corpus linguistics 
with the different studies as examples...

re nunation:

i was using MORPH until i found missing nunated forms: then i did a little 
programming to find the missing ones. to database includes fields for 
every factor i could think of...

nunation is productive till late persian, and is gone by hellenistic. in 
the non-nunating camp are Ezra-Neh-Chronicles; Song of songs and Eccles.; 
Daniel, Esther and probably Jonah. ( she for asher correlates with 
non-nunating.)

torah ordering is confirmed:  D  >> JE >> P

interesting that as nunation is lost, prosodic factors determine 
distribution: especially pause. you see this in Job, Psalms and Joel, 
e.g.

also implicated is negation, not surprisingly.  the basic contrast appears 
to be the difference between realis vs irrealis.

an e.g. of nuance:
lammah ta`asun (why do you (continue to) do this?) ~ past oriented
lammah ta`asu  (why should you think about doing this?) ~ future oriented

i hope to firm this sort of thing up with further study....
V
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Dr Vincent DeCaen     <decaen AT chass.utoronto.ca>
c/o Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations, 4 Bancroft Ave., 2d floor
University of Toronto, Toronto ON, CANADA, M5S 1A1

Hebrew Syntax Encoding Initiative, www.chass.utoronto.ca/~decaen/hsei/
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