Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Dave Washburn <dwashbur AT nyx.net>]

On Tuesday 16 August 2005 16:12, Peter Kirk wrote:
> On 16/08/2005 19:49, Dave Washburn wrote:
> > ...
> >
> >>I consider the rules of grammar to be
> >>much more fluid and context-dependent than these grammarians would ever
> >>admit. I am sure you can find whole discourses which are considered
> >>entirely grammatical as a whole but whose individual sentences would be
> >>considered ungrammatical out of context. How do your rules allow for
> >> that?
> >
> >Not sure I follow you here.  (Note the flagrantly ungrammatical
> > construction, heh heh.)  Could you give me an example?  If it's from a
> > language that I don't know, I'll trust your translation and description.
>
> No need to go anywhere unfamiliar. Look at your sentence "Not sure I
> follow you here". As you admit, that would not be considered a
> grammatical sentence in isolation, but in the context of this
> interchange it is entirely acceptable. 

That's somewhat debatable, of course; it's quite possible that some readers 
might have been put off, and it's also possible that some readers for whom 
American (I often have trouble calling it English :-) isn't a first language 
might have had difficulty understanding it because of the grammatical 
anomalies in it.  Now, just between you and me, it might be "acceptable" but 
in the broader sense of language, I would argue that this doesn't necessarily 
make it "grammatical."

> For better examples, try 
> recording and transcribing a spontaneous conversation, especially a
> slightly heated one, with a close family member. I am sure you will find
> that most of the sentences are ungrammatical in some way, with whole
> chunks elided, sentences left unfinished, etc etc. In such a case the
> normal rules just don't apply. Of course you could try to define a new
> set of rules which do apply for a particular genre, but I don't think
> you would get very far like that because really language is used so
> flexibly in such conversations.

I need go no further than an average conversation between my wife of 25 years 
and myself.  But once again, I don't see how this brings us any closer to 
understanding of the structure and usage that we find in the Hebrew Bible.

> >... It's much
> >easier to twiddle with the meaning of a particular word or phrase than
> > with a full-blown syntactic construction, at least if the goal is
> > incorporating it into the general language of the locale or group in
> > question.  Village Inn's redefinition of the word "breakfast" is a fine
> > example.
>
> Your wording and example make it sound like you think that semantic
> change comes about by someone's deliberate policy of twiddling meanings.

Some, not all.

> It doesn't. Mass media campaigns can of course help, but most semantic
> change comes about very gradually as new usages catch on. And new uses
> of verb forms and syntactic constructions do take place, although more
> slowly than changes of lexical meaning. An example would be the gradual
> replacement of the French past simple with the perfect. Another would be
> the change of the whole Hebrew verb system from aspect-based to
> tense-based, which I think happened around the 1st century CE, but I'm
> sure Ken can give more details.

Agreed.  I probably wasn't clear.  At the same time, at least in current 
American usage, most change that takes place is the result of somebody, 
whether a mass media campaign, a subculture such as rap music, or a new 
technological development, twiddling with words and coming up with something 
new.  I think you gave the example of "wicked" having taken on a positive 
connotation fairly recently; that came out of a particular subculture and 
caught on in wider society.  Saying "word" to mean "yes" didn't catch on.  
Both are examples of somebody's attempt to make a change to the language; 
some stick, some don't.

>
> > ...
> >
> >>... Clearly there are some languages
> >>which use the same verb form for sequential and non-sequential, as they
> >>don't mark for sequence at all. So you really don't have an argument
> >>against the hypothesis that Hebrew WAYYIQTOL sometimes markes for
> >>sequence but not always.
> >
> >You just made one of my points for me: some languages "dont mark for
> > sequence at all."  My suggestion is that BH is one of these.
>
> Well, my suggestion is that BH is a language which marks sequence in
> some kind of weak sense, in that WAYYIQTOL verbs have a strong tendency
> to be sequential but are not universally so, that this is a feature
> which can be cancelled in the context.

We're actually closer than either of us realizes.  I maintain that it's the 
construction of choice for simple sequential narrative precisely because it 
doesn't have any particular "baggage" that restricts it to this or that type 
of discourse.  So it's the natural choice for sequence, but said sequence 
isn't necessarily encoded in the form.  As you say, sequence is a feature 
that can be cancelled in context, because it's the context that determines 
sequentiality, not necessarily the verb form.  So I don't think we're really 
that far apart in our views.

> ...
>
> >This sounds similar to Andersen's wayyiqtol that begins a new thought.  I
> > used this model in my Trinity Journal article about the Josiah stories
> > lo, those many years ago, before I began developing my own approach.  It
> > still has a lot of merit, IMNSHO.
>
> Well, these are the kinds of ideas I had in mind. You are probably more
> familiar with the literature than I am.

Possibly.  I can't claim to have kept up, especially in the last couple of 
years.  The absence of a good library nearby has been...painful.

> >>Also,
> >>I would suggest that rather different rules apply in poetry, where there
> >>may also be some confusion with WEYIQTOL.
> >
> >I agree wholeheartedly about poetry.  In every language I know, poetry
> > does its own thing, which is why I make it a point to exclude poetry from
> > the corpi that I examine.  (Note that I don't actually know whether the
> > "proper" term is corpi, or corpuses, or corpuscles, or something else
> > altogether.)
>
> Corpora, surely? That is the Latin plural of corpus.

Good enough.  Although I sort of like "corpuscles," just because it might get 
a laugh.

> > ...
> >
> >>>...  That's why I
> >>>hammer away so hard at the principle of Social Convention.  Without
> >>>something like it, you have chaos.  I don't think that's what you're
> >>>claiming we have in language, but it seems to me that you come close to
> >>>it, at least in theory. ...
> >>
> >>Far from it. I accept that there are conventions in language, although I
> >>would call them linguistic conventions rather than social ones -
> >>especially as the word "social" suggests that your next step might be to
> >>formalise the convention and then stigmatise those who choose not to
> >>follow that formalisation as anti-social.
> >
> >Once again, I don't see how you got that from what I wrote.  The whole
> > idea of stigmatization comes from you, not from me, and in fact it has
> > never even entered into my thinking.  But as with so many other things,
> > as long as we're talking about the same thing and we know it, call it
> > what you wish.
>
> Well, it's my old fear of prescriptive grammar coming up again. But it
> has been evoked by the contrast you made between "bad grammar" and
> "virtually all uses that said society considers "good grammar" ", which
> is certainly a value judgment, also "a construction that is outside the
> generally-accepted bounds of what the society in question considers
> "correct." " And the implication of a statement like "Without something
> like it, you have chaos." is that someone is likely to come in and try
> to impose order. I would rather have chaos than language tyranny.

Okay, let me define "correct" as I'm using it then.  Within my hypothesis of 
grammar with a component of social (or perhaps sociological) convention, 
"good grammar" means grammar and structure that is easily comprehensible to 
just about anyone with a moderate grasp of the language in a particular 
synchronic context.  The famous example of the dangling participle may 
provide a workable example: "I saw the sunset walking up the hill."  Someone 
just learning English, and perhaps even children who are growing up with the 
language, could easily be confused by the idea of a sunset walking up a hill. 
 
My other example, "I'm not so hungry as I used to was" might engender similar 
confusion because it's so anomalous.  I would call both "ungrammatical" in 
the broad sense of a mixed English-speaking population.  I tend to avoid the 
term "correct" for the same reasons you do, and my use of the expression "bad 
grammar" was probably a case of laziness on my part.

One other comment on this paragraph: I did not intend to imply that there 
might be "someone...to come in and try to impose order."  What I meant to 
imply was that there could easily be communication breakdown leading to 
breakdown of the society, perhaps even war.  Loss of communication, 
misunderstanding and potential enmity are, for me, the big dangers of 
linguistic chaos.

> >>More importantly, I also deny
> >>that they can be formalised. For one thing, they are very much dependent
> >>on the specific speaker and the specific audience. Private conversations
> >>between family members and close friends are often very far from
> >>following the linguistic conventions which would be needed for a public
> >>speech or lecture, or even for a conversation in a TV chat show which
> >>must be understood by the audience. For the people conversing privately
> >>can appeal to all kinds of shared understandings, and so can take all
> >>kinds of shortcuts.
> >
> >There are idiolects, sure. ...
>
> I didn't mean idiolects of this kind, although they are perhaps
> examples, but the way in which so much intimate conversation is highly
> abbreviated, often carried on with one word sentences and grunts like
> "m-mm".

There are always subcultural dialects.  The famous Shibboleth story is a BH 
example.  But once again, I think we have gotten fairly far afield of Hebrew, 
unless we can come up with some reasonably certain examples of the sort of 
thing you're describing within the corpus of the Hebrew Bible.  

> >... When it comes to the Hebrew Bible, we're not talking at the level of
> >idiolects, we're talking at the level of a society's grammar; if we limit
> > our examination to the so-called Deuteronomic History, we're talking
> > primarly about the form of the language that was used in the various
> > royal courts. That language involves certain conventions of a type that
> > are necessary for communication to take place.  There is nothing wrong
> > with looking at those conventions and finding descriptive ways to
> > formalize them in order to understand them better.  I really don't
> > understand why you have such a problem with this idea.
>
> Well, nothing wrong with trying to formalise them, but in the case of
> informal conversational language, with such a limited corpus I don't
> think there will be much success.

Agreed.  As I said, I don't really know of anyplace where there might be such 
a thing except perhaps Song of Songs, and even that is questionable because 
it's also poetry.

> > ...
> >
> >>Unfortunately we just don't have enough knowledge to work
> >>out much of how this applies to Hebrew - although of course we can
> >>assume that the authors intended to use conventions which would be
> >>understood by their original audiences. We may see a bit of how it works
> >>if we examine reported conversations and the editorial explanations
> >>added to them for an audience which might not understand the original
> >>context.
> >
> >Agreed.  We both acknowedge the existence of idiolects, but for purposes
> > of understanding biblical Hebrew, it's irrelevant.
>
> I'm not talking about idiolects in the sense of unusual lexical uses,
> but about conversation which can be greatly abbreviated, in breach of
> the normal rules of grammar, because shared assumptions can be made.

I know.  But even at that level, I don't see how it's relevant to biblical 
Hebrew.

-- 
Dave Washburn
http://www.nyx.net/~dwashbur
"Well, if I'd wanted a safe life, I guess I wouldn't have 
married a man who studies rocks." - Betty Armstrong (Fay Masterson)