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  • From: Trevor Peterson <06PETERSON AT cua.edu>
  • To: B Hebrew <b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: RE: [b-hebrew] Basic question on Qal, Piel, and Pual
  • Date: Tue, 22 Jul 2003 12:25:41 -0400

>===== Original Message From waldo slusher <waldoslusher AT yahoo.com> =====
>It seems to me that these verb stems have the same
>consonantal FORMS, meaning that in ancient Hebrew (OT
>times), they were the same in FORM (since no vowel
>points were used) but different in FUNCTION. Is that
>correct?

Depends on what you mean by "form." If you're talking about the writing, the
answer is that usually they would have looked the same. (And while we're at
it, you should throw in the Gp (Qal passive), and in prefixal conjugations
just about everything else at one time or another. But you shouldn't think of
the writing as the be-all and end-all of the language, not by a long shot.
The
language was spoken by most, read by some, written by few. (That's an
oversimplification, and I don't want to re-open discussion of literacy, but I
think generally speaking that we can line up these categories of interaction
with the language in some relative order.) English orthography doesn't encode
everything about the language, but how often do we think about it? Just try
learning French and German, and see which one is easier to learn how to
pronounce from a written text. The rule of thumb is that you only pronounce
half of the letters in any French word. In German, you pretty much pronounce
everything just the way it looks. English seems to fall somewhere in the
middle, and I'm sure we can all think of examples where foreign speakers
would
get tripped up. Does "read" sound like "red" or "reed?" And here we have a
functional difference--if you don't know which way it's supposed to be
pronounced, you also don't know whether it's present or past tense. What kind
of a silly language would write things so ambiguously? Well, most of the time
native speakers don't have a problem with this or any number of other
ambiguities, because when it comes down to it, writing is a mnemonic device.
We look at the letters, and they remind us of a spoken word we know. If a
given clump of letters isn't clear enough on its own, usually the context in
which it appears removes all doubt.

Enough ranting. What is my point? There are at least two: 1) I would think
twice about trying to learn any language without pronouncing it. Aside from
classical scholars and people with physical handicaps, almost no one reads a
language without knowing how to speak it. Certainly, living writing systems
are not designed for people to do so--they are developed by and for native
speakers and work because they presume a certain level of oral competence
with
the language. This is especially true of West Semitic writing systems, which
brings me to my second point. 2) Hebrew, like every other language, has
always
been pronounced with vowels. The meaningful forms of the words from a
linguistic standpoint include vowels, even if they are not always written. So
from a linguistic standpoint, the form and function do correspond. That much
should be allowed, even if we conclude that the relevant formal features are
not always accessible.

Trevor Peterson
CUA/Semitics





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