Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Heard, Christopher" <Christopher.Heard AT pepperdine.edu>]

On 1/18/05 8:38 AM, "Peter Kirk" <peterkirk AT qaya.org> wrote:
> This seems like a strange philosophy, Chris. Do you have a philosophical
> problem with all labour and time saving devices? Do you do all your
> washing by hand? Do you walk everywhere? Just as cars and washing
> machines save time and effort, so does having dictionary glosses on the
> same page rather in a separate book. I could agree that it doesn't help
> students to save them making real effort to learn the language, but is
> it really the best use of their language learning time to spend much of
> it leafing through dictionaries for the right entry?

Well, first of all I should probably say that I was thinking in terms of
students actually undergoing Hebrew instruction -- as in, having flashbacks
to how overly reliant I and some of my friends became on
Armstrong-Busby-Carr.

Second, I probably didn't read well enough Philip's original statement about
his intended audience:
>>> It will be paper. I’m not targeting in-class students so much as those who
>>> have completed a year or more of Hebrew and want to read their OT 
>>> regularly,
>>> but are unwilling to take the time to look up all the words they don’t 
>>> know.
>>> That targeted audience is, even at a conservative estimate, easily 60% of
>>> all students who take 1 or more years of Hebrew.

Third, for the question
> I could agree that it doesn't help
> students to save them making real effort to learn the language, but is
> it really the best use of their language learning time to spend much of
> it leafing through dictionaries for the right entry?

[Warning: The following paragraph contains Unicode.]

I could probably argue that either way, but let me just expose a little bit
of my reasoning as to why the answer might be "yes." Or, at least, if the
tool in question simply gives brief glosses as does Armstrong-Busby-Carr or
Accordance. Dictionaries like BDB and KB give far more information than mere
translation-equivalents. Used properly, dictionaries give readers a sense of
the entire semantic range of a particular word, something that short glosses
often can't do. If done well, they also give readers a sense of how the
semantic properties of a word might vary with syntax, e.g., a dictionary
will more likely distinguish between "root XXX followed by ב" and "root XXX
followed by ל" than is a simple gloss. Often, dictionaries will provide
compressed information about the evidence for why a word is believed to have
certain translation-equivalents.

Once again, though, please note that my comments/perspectives are probably
not exactly on target with the intended audience that Philip has described.
I was thinking in terms of students enrolled in Hebrew classes, which misses
Philip's point.
 
> My problem with this work is that I see little market for it as a large
> bulk of paper when it can be done more efficiently and cheaply with
> already existing computer tools.

I quite agree with that statement. I cannot claim to know all the BH words
that occur <50x in the Tanakh, but if I wanted a quick gloss and didn't have
my KB handy, I'd pull out my PDA or open my laptop.

Chris

-- 
R. Christopher Heard
Assistant Professor of Religion
Armstrong Fellow in Religion
Pepperdine University
http://faculty.pepperdine.edu/cheard
http://www.iTanakh.org
http://www.semioticsandexegesis.info