Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Trevor Peterson <06PETERSON AT cua.edu>]

>===== Original Message From Peter Kirk <peterkirk AT ozemail.com.au> =====
> Trevor, your long contribution should be helpful in general, but it
> seems to miss out one important category which is the one Al puts
> himself in: those learning Hebrew.

To some extent, I left out this category on purpose, because I don't happen 
to 
think that transliteration is a necessary or terribly helpful step in 
learning 
BH, especially if you are learning to read from the vocalized MT (or any 
other 
vocalized text, for that matter). When I learned Akkadian, we spent the first 
few weeks working with only transliterated texts. After we'd got our feet wet 
on some of the basics of the language, we started to study the script and 
gradually worked it in, until we were able to start with a line drawing and 
come up with a translation. But the process was always: transliterate, 
normalize, translate. (Not that it's ever that straightforward, since you 
often need to be able to figure out what a phrase or clause means before you 
can go back and normalize or even figure out what some of the signs are; but 
the point is that you end up with three renditions of the text you began 
with--one that represents each sign individually with Latin letters, one that 
shows the vocalization, and one that expresses the meaning in English.) To 
this day, if I work with an Akkadian text, this same three-step process is 
the 
normal procedure. I suppose there are probably some Assyriologists who can 
sit 
down with a cuneiform text they've never seen before and read it as smoothly 
as, for instance, I might be able to read a line from the MT. But at some 
point you have to make an intentional and energetic effort to break out of 
the 
more stilted process I've described here.

When I learned Syriac, we read unvoweled texts. I think most of us students 
prepared for the readings in class by vocalizing them ourselves. We didn't 
have to transliterate to do this--we just added the vowels (Eastern or 
Western, depending on the circumstances) to the existing consonantal text.

Now that I'm studying Ugaritic, we're back to the same basic process that we 
used in Akkadian. It's a little bit easier to skip the first step, but it's 
still nothing like reading Hebrew directly from the page to the mouth and 
understanding.

I say all of this to point out that I've had experience with several 
different 
Semitic languages, which use different scripts. With Akkadian, I think there 
is some justification for using the longer process, because the writing 
system 
is so complicated. The student must learn hundreds of signs, and if there is 
nothing to hang them on in the process, the process will be very long and 
laborious (even more so than it already is). Plus, in our case, we were not 
training to be Assyriologists, so if all we can do is muddle our way through 
a 
text, it's probably about all we can expect from a two-year program anyway. 
Syriac has the same basic alphabet that Hebrew has, except that the script is 
quite different. Most of the letters do not look similar enough to their 
square-script counterparts for the correlation to be all that helpful. So it 
required us to learn a new script, just as any beginning Hebrew student must 
do. The voweling isn't quite as complicated, but there are two systems to 
learn (in addition to three major consonantal scripts). We'd probably learned 
them well enough to get by after a week or two.

Does it require some work to learn the script? Of course. But it really isn't 
as much as you might think, and you'll get to the point where you can read 
comfortably from the text a lot faster than if you rely on transliteration as 
a crutch. So you see, I don't think learning Hebrew is a good reason to use 
transliteration, which is one reason that I didn't include it. The other 
reason is that I would put it somewhere in the same category with the 
linguist 
and the comparative Semitist, who learn to read only from transcription. If 
the student learned to use IPA, it would probably be a productive effort in 
some respect, and personally I like the idea of students studying for spoken 
fluency, which means a pronunciation-focused transcription system would be a 
better place to start than one that focuses so heavily on representing the 
exact letters. Once some basics are grasped in spoken form, the writing 
system 
could be studied as a separate step. But if a student is going to take that 
approach, probably the best means would be to follow Randall Buth's system 
and 
actually learn it as spoken language in the early stages.

Trevor Peterson
CUA/Semitics