Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Yitzhak Sapir <yitzhaksapir AT gmail.com>]

On 9/5/05, Read, James C wrote:
> Imagine 2,000 years from now a group of 'scholars' that go about 
> studying the now dead English language.

While this list is related to Hebrew only, it is obvious that you are 
attempting to draw a parallel (note spelling) to analysis of Biblical 
Hebrew.  However, first of all, your example is contrived.  You control 
the two phrases that are compared via the two languages, as well as the 
representation of these phrases in the evidence ("Having analysed the 
data they see that the meaning of 'what bad manners' fits the context 
well and apart from one or two difficult examples").  As Kevin Riley 
noted, English and Italian are very distant cognate languages (somewhat 
like Akkadian and Hebrew) as compared between English and Dutch 
(like Ugaritic and Hebrew).  But many Latin words were borrowed into 
English as in this case.  Another problem with your example is that it 
suggests that the student is perfectly OK when he claims he need not 
prove that the two newspaper examples he brought are "just an isolated 
example of an idiom."  This suggests the student was not following a very
sound methodology because if he was, he would have done this long 
before the scholar asked him on the forum to do so.

However, what it does show is your perception of academic (again, note
spelling) ability and how the academy treats people.  No one will fail a
degree because he insists that one particular phrase is analyzed wrong
and is willing to go out and perform an in-depth study of the use of the
phrase.  Nor would an in depth study of such a phrase be thrown out by
scholarship or not published in serious scientific journals or publications.
Rather, if his methods are sloppy, if he refuses to acknowledge various
evidence, if he refuses even to read the articles and publications of those 
who write the "bad manners" "conspiracy" theories, all of those would be
grounds for not accepting the study into a serious publication.  If his
refusal to read articles and publications of opposing views is more 
widespread than these two phrases he will also probably fail his courses.

You don't have to believe the earth revolves around the sun to study 
astronomy.  But you must be willing to read all the studies that claim the 
earth is round or assume the earth is round or bring evidence to that end, 
as well as be able to perform calculations and computations based on that
assumption.  In fact, modern physics takes the position that neither view
is objectively correct but computations become much simpler with the 
assumption that the earth revolves around the sun than vice versa.  It's one
of the assumptions underlying the theory of relativity, which means it wasn't
even "proven" by this theory -- just assumed.   But it was still published in 
serious publications, because the methodology was sound.

By the way, the various consistent misspellings in your posts, of which
some examples were noted here but just in the post above there are
several more words that are problematic, give you a very bad impression
in themselves.  Use a spell checker if you want a more favorable reception 
amongst the academic community :-)

Yitzhak Sapir