Biblical Hebrew Forum

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

>===== Original Message From CS Bartholomew <jacksonpollock AT earthlink.net> 
=====
>Does anyone who has taken a serious look at this issue have any reservations
>about developing a Hebrew dictionary which is structured around this
>distinction?

ISTM that there's an inherent problem here. What is the unaffected meaning of 
a word? Well, I don't see how it can be anything except an abstraction from 
the various contexts in which we've encountered the word. Basically, whether 
consciously or unconsciously, we strip away anything about the word that 
seems 
to be unique to one context or another and synthesize what remains into some 
bundle of ideas. That seems simple enough, but particularly when we're 
talking 
about mining ancient texts for meaningful units, I'm not sure how well we can 
sort out affected from unaffected meaning in most cases.

Trevor Peterson
CUA/Semitics