Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Karl Randolph" <kwrandolph AT email.com>]

Dear Dale Wheeler:

You wrote:
> So after beginning with the claim that all other grammars have used the 
> wrong reasons (viz., waw-prefixed verbs and pronounless verbs starting 
> sentences) to come to the VSO conclusion, they then come to *exactly* the 
> same conclusion, but they call it "PreVerbal Field" and "Main (ie., verb + 
> everything else) Field".  So what was the point of implying that VSO was 
> wrong, but then following a VSO approach, but just using different 
> terminology??  And linguistics wonder why people get frustrated with their 
> introduction of whole new sets of terminology...
>
LOL!

I ran into the same problem when studying Chinese where the linguists 
insisted on treating Chinese sentences based on strange terminology, but when 
I got out on the street and spoke it, the basic sentence structure is SVO. 
When using helping verbs and dependent clauses, there are some funny 
placement of verbs, sort of like the German putting them at the end of the 
sentence. The linguists’ funny terminology only confuses matters.

As for Hebrew, I notice that the word order seems more dependent on 
importance to the idea of the sentence than a strict word order. Further, 
with prefixes and suffixes, it is possible to say a whole, simple sentence in 
one word, making it harder to insist on SVO vs. VSO. True, in simple 
narration the verb tends to lead, but how often is that true because it 
contains both the verb and the subject pronoun? To make a big issue of this 
seems to me to be like a tempest in a teakettle.

Karl W. Randolph.
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