Skip to Content.
Sympa Menu

b-hebrew - Re: [b-hebrew] Ancient Language Acquisition

b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org

Subject: Biblical Hebrew Forum

List archive

Chronological Thread  
  • From: "Karl Randolph" <kwrandolph AT email.com>
  • To: "Hebrew" <b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] Ancient Language Acquisition
  • Date: Tue, 02 Mar 2004 19:35:15 -0500

This raises an interesting question: how far
apart in language change can we get before we
have confusion?

Let’s take English as an example:

For me, Shakespear and the KJV translation are
actually harder to read than Chaucer. The
former sound so similar to modern English that
the differences rise up to bite me. I have
never been taught where Elizabethan English
differs from modern English, therefore I’m not
looking for those differences, therefore I
don’t recognize many of them, with the result
that I often misunderstand passages. With
Chaucer, OTOH, I don’t expect to understand
it, I am more ready to look up what I don’t
understand and as a result I make fewer
mistakes. Beowulf is closer to modern
Norwegian than modern English, therefore I
read it as a foreign, cognate language. (By
the way, what’s a “grendel” or “grindel”?
Apparently it was a large, nocturnal, bipedal
carnivore that had large jaws but small and
weak forearms which tended to live in
marshlands. Similarly, how many animals
mentioned in Tanakh are now extinct?)

If a person is taught modern Hebrew and
Biblical Hebrew where the differences in
grammar, overlapping but different vocabulary,
are taught, sort of like the differences
between modern English and Chaucerian, a
student who is not a scholar may be able to
keep them apart, but if he is taught all these
plus all the intermediate steps, will not his
understanding end up being a rather mish mash
of all and not really understanding any of
them well? That is, unless he has the time to
become a scholar?

As for Biblical Hebrew, its use seems
remarkably consistent with little evidence of
dialectal differentiation. The biggest
difference that I noticed is chronological:
books written before Galut Babel such as
Isaiah and Jeremiah, tended towards complexity
while those written afterwards, such as Ezra
and Nehemiah, tended towards greater
simplicity. Yet even there, the grammar and
vocabulary tended to remain consistent.

Karl W. Randolph.


----- Original Message -----
From: Jonathan Walther <krooger AT debian.org>
Date: Mon, 1 Mar 2004 18:22:58 -0800
To: b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org
Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] Ancient Language Acquisition

> On Mon, Mar 01, 2004 at 06:39:02PM -0500, Trevor Peterson wrote:
> >can exercise, but even then there are questions of whether samples from
> >the biblical corpus represent one or several dialects. It would seem
> >counterproductive for students to internalize a conglomerate that is not
> >really any one dialect.
>
> When I learned to read English as a lad, I did just that; I steadily
> read my way backwards from Alice in Wonderland, to Howard Pyle, to
> Shakespeare, to Chaucer. Beyond Chaucer I could not go; Beowulfe feels
> very familiar, but is gibberish as far as comprehension goes. My
> English is a conglomerate of all the variations and developements from
> the past thousand years. Would it be a bad thing to understand ancient
> Hebrew or koine Greek in the same way?
>
> Dialects are always forming and disappearing; is it really productive to
> worry about separation of dialects when my experience of English is that
> a broader view allows all dialects to be expressions of a single, rich,
> underlying language?
>
> Jonathan
>
> --
> Address: 13685 Hilton Road, Surrey, BC V3R5J8 (Canada)
> Contact: 604-951-4142 (between 7am and 10pm, PST)
> Website: http://reactor-core.org
--
___________________________________________________________
Sign-up for Ads Free at Mail.com
http://promo.mail.com/adsfreejump.htm





Archive powered by MHonArc 2.6.24.

Top of Page