Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Randall Buth <ButhFam AT compuserve.com>]

shalom Trevor,

Your point is common sense, from my view.
>The point is to parallel natural language learning. Well, what
>happens with children? They learn their native tongue "by osmosis," then
>they spend a dozen years or so refining that knowledge through classroom
>instruction, learning rules, correcting errors, improving style, etc. The
>process doesn't have to end even there, if the student develops
sensitivity
>to the relevant issues and continues to learn by reading. So, worst-case
>scenario, Randall is the hillbilly parent teaching his kids to communicate
>effectively in the language. Even if it takes a while to re-work the rough
>edges, they're still better off than never having learned to speak at all.

So far so good. 
Things can get bizarre. A more worse-case senario:
imagine the hillbilly teaching his kids "It's me" and then sending them
around 
the world where a Siamese non-English speaking English teacher 
straightened  them out with 'it is I.' 

I've actually had this happen. Sending someone out with 
"ani ro'e et  ha-ish sham" inside them to have it "corrected" into 
"er'e et ha-ish sham"

Or someone who can say 
"ha-ish ba el ha-har vayyar et ha-`anan" only to have a 
weingreenian "correct" them into 
"ba ha-ish el ha-har vayyar et ha-`anan"

Or to read Isaiah 1.27 and recognize the focal word:
tsiyon BEMISHPAT tippade
only to be told that such a sentence is either 
poor/bad-, foreign-, poetic-, chiastic-, unknown-, or unrecoverable
grammar.

oy-na li,   `ad ana,
`ad matay?

blessings

Randall Buth
Director, Biblical Language Center
www.biblicalulpan.org
and Lecturer, Biblical Hebrew
Rothberg International School
Hebrew University