Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Peter Kirk <peterkirk AT qaya.org>]

On 28/09/2004 19:44, C. Stirling Bartholomew wrote:

> On 9/28/04 10:36 AM, "Peter Kirk" <peterkirk AT qaya.org> wrote:
>
>  
>
> > Well, (&W )DWM and YHWH H)LHYM would also be grammatical sentences, so
> > the added HW) is syntactically unnecessary here, just like the added HW)
> > or other pronoun in a sentence with a finite verb but no explicit
> > subject. The syntactic analogy of course does not necessarily imply
> > similar semantics.
> >    
>
> Right. One question,
>
> a.  Mistah Kurtz--he dead
> b.  Mistah Kurtz [is] dead.
>
> Assume these represent the BH clauses, are they equivalent?
> If not, what type of function does "he" perform? Pragmatic? Semantic?
>
>  
Well, in my dialect of English, forms of this without "is" are 
ungrammatical, and so is "Mistah Kurtz he is dead". So I can't compare 
these forms in an unfamiliar dialect.

In both Hebrew and Russian the equivalent of "Mistah Kurtz dead" is 
grammatical, and also the equivalent of "he" may be added. In Russian, 
"Mistah Kurtz dead" would be normal, and "Mistah Kurtz he dead" would 
require a break before "he" and mean "As for Mistah Kurtz, he is dead". 
But I'm not sure that the distinction is the same in Hebrew.

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