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  • From: furuli AT online.no
  • To: b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] nefarious nefesh
  • Date: Wed, 5 Feb 2003 10:42:31 +0100


Dear Matthew,



When we discuss *meaning*, it is profitable to use Ogden's triangle of signification. In one corner we find "sign", in the other "concept", and in the third "reference".

The "sign" represents the letters NP$ (or its pronunciation). For people with the same presupposition pool, the sign of a word signals something, namely a "concept" in the mind. This "concept" cannot ( and need not) be defined. It has a relative clear core but is fuzzy towards the edges; it represents all the native speaker associates with the "signal". I would equate "concept" and "meaning"; thus the "meaning" of a word is not found in lexicons, but in the minds of living people. The "reference simply" is the thing in the word denoted by a word in a particular context. This means that the context does not generate "meaning", as is often wrongly claimed, but the role of the context is to indicate to the reader which part of the "concept" the author wants to make visible, or which "reference" does he or she have in mind.

Many Hebrew nouns and verbs signal just one "concept", but others, particularly when ancient laryngeals have been fused, signal more than one concept. I would say that NP$ signals just one "concept". Whereas the "concept" cannot be defined, we can often be able to give a rough generalization of the core of the concept. In the case of NP$ my suggestion for a generalization is "a creature with the right to live". In different contexts, different objects are referred to (the "reference" part of the triangle) by NP$ (men, animals, God, even metephorically $)L and the earth). In other contexts more abstract ideas are stressed (life, the right to live etc.), but Liz is right, the idea of an immortal soul is completely absent from the Tanach.

As for the "corpse" application, I view this as a reference. One could refer to a dead body and call it NP$, because it once had been a living creature. The advantage of the concepts having fuzzy edges is that a known root could get new references which the readers could understand, even though they had never seen such a reference before.

Etymology is tricky business, and to try to find the original meaning, or to claim that the original meaning somehow is present in all *diachronic* uses of a particular word, is impossible. This is what is called "the etymological fallacy". However, in the *synchronic* use of a root such as NP$, there was just one meaning. In the days of Zedekiah, for example, NP$ was represented by one sign (the three letters) and it had one "meaning" (the "concept" in the minds of those living at the time). I would call the modern claim that "a words does not have a meaning without a context" as "the contextual fallacy" because many of those advocating it do not use Ogden's distinctions, do not make ac diachronic/synchronic distinction, and overlook the results of modern Psycho-linguistic research.

I think that your quest for an understanding of how "breath" is associated with NP$ hardly will give clear results - we simply have no informants. We can just think of the vehicle "bus", a word which comes from the Latin word "omnis" ("all") and the dative/ablative inflectional ending: "for all", omnibus > bus. There is hardly any connection with the mentioned vehicle and an inflectional ending in Latin


Best regards

Rolf Furuli
University of Oslo






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