Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Frank Polak <frankha AT post.tau.ac.il>]

Shalom Aleichem,
Like some othersi am new to this game. In my view the SV/VS game is not
right for Semitic languages, apart from Akkadian (most of the time, if
the Object is
not fronted).
As Lenart de Regt showed (in the Hoftijzer Volume I think), in Deut. 70
% has
the order Predciate Subject (that's the way to formulate it for us), 30
% Subject
Predicate. The point is that English and French are special in allowing
only one
way of ordering the sentence elements. I still remember one of my first
classes
in Latin when I told my teacher I can't do the translation from Dutch
into Latin (it was
our first theme), because I don't know the order of the words in the
sentence (afterwards
Dressler found out that in gravestones the order is SV, which to his
mind turns Latin
into an SV language). There may be preferred sentence orders in Latin
(Verbal Predicate
ate the end), but they are far from obligatory, unlike the SV order in
English.
If you think, like I did that the relation to salience is
all-explanatory, just consider Isaiah
1.3: Yada( Shor qonehu / waHamor )Ebus Be(alaw
Yis'ra)el lo yada( (ammy lo hitbonan.
I don't think that the Shor is not salient. And i don't think that in
the secondf clause
we can say that the deleted Predicate should either follow or precede
Hamor, in the
'Deep structure'). For Biblical Aramaic (in the Daniel volume of the
Leuven BETL series),
I found that the real poinit is the preference for Obj-Pred in eastern,
and for Pred-Obj
in Western texts (based on Kutscher of course), but these prefernces,
based as they are
on Akkadian and Sumerian (in which OP is ALMOST obligatory, but not as
absolute as
SP in English).
The point is, nobody should ever have considered the SV?VS game
universal, just because
it his own Mother language (1 out of thousands) has some exceptional
laws in this
respect (which I ofund extremely difficult to master, even though Dutch
also counts as
SV, which it isn't in the same sense as English, and not even in the
same sense as German.).
Best Reagrds,
Frank Polak
> > SV?VS