Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Peter Kirk <peterkirk AT qaya.org>]

On 16/11/2003 01:12, Karl Randolph wrote:

> ...
>
> Like Peter Kirk, my native tongue is English, however I have lived in 
> non-English speaking environments forcing me to learn other languages. From 
> those experiences I learned how to learn foreign languages, not as a second 
> language, but as much as possible as a native speaker. I have tried to take 
> the lessons learned to apply them to learning Biblical Hebrew.
>  
All of this applies to me as well, by the way.

> The first lesson I learned is that lexemes have one core meaning (unless 
> where there are two lexemes with the same pronunciation that have merged, 
> like “to” and “two” in English). I found it easiest to learn to use the 
> lexemes correctly if I could learn that core definition to recognize how it 
> is used, even if it didn’t make sense in English. As far as I can tell, this 
> is what Rolf Furuli means with his psycho-linguistics in word definitions.
>
> Another of the lessons I applied was to compare synonyms, sometimes 
> contrasting antonyms, to find out what lexemes mean. For example, there are 
> over a dozen synonyms for R)H [ra‘ah] “to look, see” in Tanakh. Some synonyms 
> have a broad meaning, such as “to put” in English, others much more 
> restricted, such as “to set up”.
>
> One concept specific to Biblical Hebrew, look to see how lexemes are actually 
> used in Hebrew, not how we think (for theological or other reasons) they 
> should mean. Ah, theologians love to spin airy castles of theological 
> meaning, often based on definitions I couldn’t find when I looked at the 
> original text. (Maybe I’m not imaginative enough.)
>  
I like your approach here.


--
Peter Kirk
peter AT qaya.org (personal)
peterkirk AT qaya.org (work)
http://www.qaya.org/