Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Dave Washburn <dwashbur AT nyx.net>]

On Tuesday 28 September 2004 12:44, 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?

This isn't a good analogy, because the former is an idiomatic, "pidgin" 
dialect that isn't really representative of generally-accepted English 
grammar.  I suspect it was formed by analogy with the speaker's native 
language, and that language was most likely one in which such a construction 
was acceptable.  The Smothers Brothers used to do a commercial for a brand of 
television in which one of them spoke about "how smart I are."  The fact that 
he said it doesn't make it good English, though.

-- 
Dave Washburn
http://www.nyx.net/~dwashbur
"No good.  Hit on head."   -Gronk