Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Read, James C" <K0434995 AT kingston.ac.uk>]

While chocolicism is not a formal medical condition, it is clear that the 
word play indicates more than a simple like of chocolate.

Would describe a person who loves chocolate but only eats it once a 
year/month/week 
as a chocoholic?
I can't speak for all of the UK but I have certainly never heard it used of 
such 
of a person.

A person who describes themselves as a chocoholic is usually a person who 
cannot 
resist the temptation to indulge when chocolate is in their sight or offered 
to 
them. Now I like chocolate but I can hardly be described as such a person 
because 
I find it quiet easy to turn chocolate down but have extreme difficulty when 
a 
real pizzeria (only found in Italy) offers me a pizza. Maybe I'm a pizzaholic 
(now this is a pun as I understand the term). I'm also a b-hebrewaholic and a 
debate-aholic but definitely not a chocoholic.

Our discussion has highlighted one very important factor, though - that 
different 
people have different understanding of the same term (even if they share the 
same 
first language). And so the question very often is not 'What does the term 
mean?' 
but 'What did the author intend to communicate?'. A question that can only be 
answered
from context and good linguistic instincts combined with a good relationship 
with 
Yah.
-----Original Message-----
From: b-hebrew-bounces AT lists.ibiblio.org on behalf of Stoney Breyer
Sent: Tue 9/20/2005 7:36 PM
To: b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org
Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] 'Chocoholic'
 

-----Original Message-----
From: Peter Kirk [mailto:peterkirk AT qaya.org] 
> Many people do not think this is possible, but as chocolate releases
> endorphins it is possible for the brain to become accustomed to
regular 
> intervals of chocolate.

That's interesting, and a little troubling! Nonetheless, "chocoholic" is
in common usage a jocular term; and since it does not follow regular
rules of analogic formation (which would call for "chocolatic"), I doubt
that the medical establishment would use it as the label for an actual
addiction to chocolate. I would expect something on the order of
'Chocolate Habituation Syndrome (CHS)" ... 

Stoney Breyer
Writer/Toucwood, Inc.



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----- Original Message -----
From: "Yitzhak Sapir" <yitzhaksapir AT gmail.com>
> 
> On 9/19/05, Karl Randolph wrote:
> 
>...
> 
> > Similarly, no mountain of data from cognate languages
> > will sway me as long as certain questions remain
> > unanswered.
> 
> You can't claim this is the issue until you've looked at the
> evidence.

To use a term from the computer industry, GIGO.

While I have not looked at the sheer amount of data, I 
have seen some of it. Unless more data differs in quality 
from that I have seen, mere quantity becomes tedious. 
What I have seen is not convincing, mainly because it 
does not control for time, rather it assumes "all along".

>  Right now, you refuse to look, no matter the
> reason.  And really, it seems to me that the reason is that
> you made an assumption regarding the roots of Hebrew
> being unique, spent a lot of time constructing a dictionary,
> and now do not want to review that initial assumption which
> was never based on anything more than your personal
> belief in it, without evidence, but which will effectively mean
> the dictionary is erroneous in many places.  No wonder you
> don't want to reconsider it or even devote time to reviewing
> the evidence.
> 
Rather, I have rejected your theory based on the data I 
have seen so far.

The most obvious example is the sin/shin bifurcation. This 
is also an example I can refer to without looking at your 
data. While writing the dictionary, I noticed several 
examples of words used in the same contexts, with the 
same meanings differing only in use of sin or shin. (I didn't 
catalog all of them, so I would have to spend hours to 
make a catalog.) Secondly, I noticed words where one 
root derivative as determined by meaning and context will 
use a shin while another a sin. The example of the latter 
that comes immediately to my mind is "place" where the 
verb %YM to place is written with a sin, while $M that 
place, i.e. there is written with a shin. Even $M name 
could come from the same root as people place a person 
by his name when speaking. This is the type of data which 
is inconsistent with your theory, but consistent with a late 
bifurcation caused by corruption in the language caused 
by the fact that it was no longer spoken as a primary 
language, and that the pattern of corruption is similar to 
the pattern found in the corrupting, primary language 
spoken.

The few examples I have seen for the ayin/ghayin 
bifurcation I have found either inconclusive to unlikely.

> > First, why should be assume that if certain
> > patterns exist in cognate languages, that they were
> > originally in Biblical Hebrew and not merely imported into
> > post Biblical Hebrew?
> 
> When you understand the breadth of the evidence, you'll
> understand why.  It also doesn't explain how the Shin/Sin
> difference would be imported without importing the
> associated phonetic values.
> 
> > You mentioned similarities between Ugaritic and Arabic; seeing as 
> > both had northern Semitic origins, what's to prevent their 
> > similarities having a common source, one not shared by Biblical 
> > Hebrew, or even early Aramaic?
> 
> Arabic is not Northern Semitic.

To quote the Wikipedia article you earlier referenced, "In the 6th 
and 5th centuries BC, north-Semitic tribes immigrated and 
founded a kingdom centered around Petra, in what is now 
Jordan. These people (now named Nabataeans from the name 
of one of the tribes, Naba?u), spoke probably a form of Arabic

"In the 2nd century AD, the first known records of the 
Nabataean alphabet were written, in the Aramaic language 
(which was the language of communication and trade), but 
including some Arabic language features: the Nabataeans 
did not write the language which they spoke. They wrote in 
a form of the Aramaic alphabet, which continued to evolve; 
it separated into two forms: one intended for inscriptions 
(known as "monumental Nabataean") and the other, more 
cursive and hurriedly written and with joined letters, for 
writing on papyrus. This cursive form influenced the 
monumental form more and more and gradually changed 
into the Arabic alphabet."

The article clearly connects Arabic with northern 
Semitic peoples and language, do you disagree with it?

>  Hebrew and Aramaic
> are closer to Ugaritic and Phoenician than they are to
> Arabic.  

That can be explained by passage of time, nothing 
fancier.

>   Do you want to now reclassify Arabic and
> Ugaritic, two languages you haven't studied and
> know little about as a separate branch independent of
> Hebrew and Aramaic?

Unless you have clear data to the contrary, can you 
disprove it? So far the only arguments I have seen to 
disprove it is theory, not data. I don't pretend to prove my 
theory, rather I claim that the data are too fragmentary to 
say either way.

>   You can propose a lot of things.
> The question is not what you propose when you are
> oblivious to the evidence.  But what you propose when
> you are fully aware of it.
> 
> > You are making assumptions that I don't share.
> 
> You're the one assuming that each root must be uniquely
> represented graphically.

Excuse me, where did I make that claime?

>  I'm not assuming anything.  I'm
> letting the linguistic evidence suggest the most plausible
> answer.
> 
> ...
> 
> > Assuming that that wikipedia article is accurate, we find
> > that the Arabs originally wrote in other languages, in the
> > same manner as Europeans wrote in Latin rather than
> > their vernaculars for centuries. When the Arabs for
> > religious reasons wrote large documents in Arabic, they
> > had the graphemes to indicate their recognized
> > phonemes. Since then, has their spelling frozen?
> 
> Note where it speaks of "Pre-Islamic Arabic Inscriptions."
> "They mostly do not use dots."  The list that follows shows
> that Arabic was written over several centuries in this way.  And
> you don't know that Arabic wasn't widely written this way, just
> on perishable materials.
> 
But from the same article, we read that before the adding 
of dots to make more graphemes in Arabic, most official 
documents were written in Aramaic or other more widely 
written languages. It was only with the advent of the Quran 
that Arabic was widely written in official documents and 
that it had its full complement of graphemes.

> > > You don't know how Hebrew was spelled in the time of Moses and
> > > it is not "historically attested" then, whenever you think Moses lived.
> > >
> > We simply have to trust the scribes, that they accurately
> > transmitted the text. If we can't trust the scribes, then we
> > should shut the door on the study of Biblical Hebrew, and
> > claim that detailed study of Hebrew starts with the DSS.
> 
> Serious detailed study of Hebrew does begin with the DSS,
> and that does not mean that we should "shut the door on
> the study of Biblical Hebrew."  But if you trust the scribes
> to transmit the text, why don't you trust the readers to
> transmit the vocalization?
> 
There's a difference between writing and speaking. 
Writing is hard data, speaking is soft. The hard can be 
reproduced even when the soft is lost. In fact, 
archeologists regularly reproduce (in photographs and/or 
drawings at least) data for which the software (use of the 
object, interpretation of writing) has been lost.

I could make an analogy between computers and 
software. This computer that I used to write this message 
is 10 years old. The hardware can be analyzed and 
reproduced unchanged. But the software can change, as 
when I bought this computer, it was running Mac OS 7.6, 
but now it is running Mac OS X 10.2.8, Safari browser and 
other Unix programs. (Apple hates me as they want me to 
buy new hardware.) I have lost old programs that I no 
longer use. But the hardware keeps going.

Similarly, it is easier to reproduce data tied up in hardware 
(ink on parchment, groves in stone, etc.) than that in 
software (peoples' memories).

As for Hebrew pronunciations, the Masoretic dots are 
separated from the last native speaker of Biblical Hebrew 
by about a millennium. When there is such a gap, it is very 
unlikely that the pronunciation was preserved, especially 
when there are clear examples where the dots are wrong.

> > That these major documents from the dawn of alphabetic
> > writing when graphemes were freely added or subtracted
> > to fit the spoken language, their use of 22 graphemes is
> > evidence that the language originally had 22 recognized
> > consonantal phonemes. Just as Arabic when the first
> > major documents were written in it, it had the graphemes
> > to indicate its 28 consonantal phonemes, so Torah's 22
> > graphemes indicate its original linguistic structure for
> > the time of the writing.
> 
> You don't know when the first major documents were written
> in Arabic, and you don't know that graphemes were freely
> added or subtracted in Semitic languages.  Those are
> assumptions you are making and which have no basis in
> evidence.
> 
> > To summarize, data are useless unless they can be
> > integrated into a theoretical construct. If the data can be
> > integrated into more than one theoretical construct, then
> > the question becomes which is the correct theoretical
> > construct? The answer may be a third theoretical construct
> > that neither of the first two considered.
> 
> Read the evidence then you can see which constructs you
> can fit them into.
> 
> > You start with the theory that the later writing with
> > indicators for more than the 22 consonantal phonemes
> > show that these extra phonemes always existed in the
> > language.
> 
> Again, that's a misrepresentation for what I wrote.  I use
> the writing side by side with comparison to other languages
> that are distantly related, after comparing a very large
> number of combined roots.
> 
> > I claim that starting with the returnees from the
> > Babylonian Captivity that they bastardized a language
> > that they did not natively speak, but one that they used in
> > the same manner as Latin in the medieval period. Already
> > by the time of the LXX the pronunciation no longer
> > reflected Biblical Hebrew, rather closer to the Aramaic of
> > the period.
> 
> You claim this apparently not knowing Aramaic and
> definitely not having studied Official or Qumran Aramaic.
> 
> > Without access to native speakers from the
> > relevant periods, we cannot answer which theory is
> > correct. Both theories provide for a consistent integration
> > of the data. That your theory is today more widely held
> > does not mean that it is correct.
> 
> So long as you don't look at the evidence, you can't
> suggest your theory is an alternative.  You know, I
> always find that after looking at an analysis of the
> evidence, I usually have to adjust my theory somehow.
> It can be little, it can be a lot, but my theories always
> become more robust as a result.  You've admitted there
> is evidence but you don't have time to look at it.  You
> can't just pretend it isn't there.
> 
There are data, and there are theories. I don't dispute the 
data. What I dispute is the interpretation of the data, i.e. 
the theories. Your theory contradicts historically attested 
uses of alphabetic writing. It contradicts data from other 
sources. What it explains can also be explained by other 
theories. In order to have a convincing argument, you 
need to present a different sort of data, not just 
comparison of languages, but historical references that so 
far you have not brought out (do they exist? So far I have 
seen no such references.). Mere reference to a theoretical 
proto-Semitic language does not count as the theory can 
be wrong.

> Yitzhak Sapir

Karl W. Randolph.

-- 
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