Biblical Hebrew Forum

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

Hi,

I believe that the americas languages are owed to migraters who parted before 
the 
orientals. I believe that they crossed over the ice sheets from Russia to 
Alaska 
and worked their way down into the Americas.

Africa as a basin of life seems credible, although i would disagree with the 
date.
I come from a highly scientific background (especially chemistry) and remain 
unimpressed by many dating methods which are dependent on variables which we 
cannot 
claim to have enough knowledge about (e.g. carbon dating is directly 
proportional 
to the amounts of radiation the substance has been exposed to. as we cannot 
know 
for sure that past exposure was consistent with present exposure we cannot 
rely 
completely on such methods).

Genesis describes the garden of Eden in relationship to the Tigris and 
Euphrates 
rivers. It is possible that after the expulsion from the garden that a large 
portion 
of the human family migrated to Northern Africa and that this is why physical 
evidence 
is abundant in this region.

The existence of flood stories throughout the world not only indicates that 
such 
may be based on real cataclysm but also that all human families are descended 
from 
the same survivors. It is logical to assume that those survivors spoke the 
same language. 
Migration from the Ararat mountains to Babel is also a credible feat.


-----Original Message-----
From: Peter Kirk [mailto:peterkirk AT qaya.org]
Sent: Wed 9/21/2005 1:37 PM
To: Read, James C
Cc: b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org
Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] Language Evolution
 
On 21/09/2005 08:49, Read, James C wrote:

>...
>
>Anyway, on with the linguistics! These factors seem to suggest that the idea 
>of a community centered around a citadel with a common language as presented 
>in the account of the tower of Babel seems reasonable from both a faith 
>perspective and from a historical perspective. The bible tells us that Yah 
>himself confused the languages (I believe this to be true). The historians 
>may prefer to believe that the growing populace evolved new languages as 
>they were now more spread out with no unifying linguistic standard.
>  
>

James, I don't want to belittle your faith position, but the scholarly 
evidence (not so much historical as geological and genetic, with some 
archaeology as well) now seems to point in a rather different direction. 
There is a consensus based on good genetic evidence that modern humans 
first lived in Africa, and that all non-Africans (ignoring racial mixing 
in the last few millennia) descend from a small group which left Africa 
around 80,000 years ago. So your hypothesised flood and probably your 
single world language would have to be relocated to Africa and pushed 
back to something like 100,000 years ago.

An alternative which has been suggested is that the flood stories found 
worldwide relate to a catastrophic flooding at the end of the last Ice 
Age. The sea level is now thought to have risen by as much as 100 metres 
between 14,000 years and 7,000 years ago - although it has been fairly 
stable since then. The rise would generally have been gradual, but there 
may have been catastrophic sudden rises accompanied by huge tsunamis at 
certain times e.g. when major ice sheets collapsed. The last such major 
event was the collapse of the Laurentide ice sheet into what is now 
Hudson Bay, about 8,000 years ago; some geologists have suggested a very 
rapid 25 metre rise in sea level to not far below the modern level, 
followed by a graudal fall of perhaps 6 metres and then another more 
gradual rise. (The exact levels vary from place to place because of 
local geological changes.)

In an era when humans probably almost all lived near the coast, such 
events would have been truly catastrophic for all inhabited areas. In 
the Middle East, the area in question for the Hebrew flood story, the 
Persian Gulf would probably have been largely dry before this event, but 
would have filled rapidly and catastrophically, flooding and drowning a 
huge area. The biblical and other Middle Eastern flood stories may well 
relate to this event - which may correspond archaeologically with the 
start of the 'Ubaid period around 5500 BCE. After this flood Babylon, 
which was not far above the highest flood level, may have become a 
centre of resettlement, until that society disintegrated leading to 
language diversification.

It is interesting that a lot of attention has been given recently to the 
flooding of the Black Sea as a possible candidate for the biblical 
flood, but not so much to the flooding of the Gulf which happened not 
long before, and may have been even more sudden and catastrophic.

>...
>It is therefore not unreasonable to assume that, for whatever reason, the 
>major 
>linguistic families had there beginnings in some common place (e.g. babel 
>and 
>its surroundings) and that through migration these languages spread into the 
>world 
>in their different directions, african languages moving south, 
>Chinese/Japanes family 
>moving East (way East!), Latin/Greek moving west, Norse moving North-West, 
>Syrillic 
>moving North-East and the Semitic languages continuing to dominate the ANE.
>Therefore, what we loosely refer to as 'proto-semitic' must be the original 
>Semitic language that existed in Babel before the mass migrations started.
>  
>

James, I am surprised that you are not better informed about the details 
here. This kind of picture is very probably true of Semitic languages 
and perhaps the wider Afro-Asiatic group (spoken only in northern parts 
of Africa and the Middle East), and perhaps of other Eurasian languages. 
From the scholarly rather than faith perspective it is very unlikely to 
be true of southern African, Australian and American languages. 
Australia and America were essentially cut off from Eurasia until modern 
times by the rising sea levels after the Ice Age, and southern Africa, 
also fairly well cut off by deserts, would have almost certainly 
retained its original languages. The Austronesian languages of SE Asia 
may well have a similar separate history, but that is a different matter.

For much of this I am dependent on the popular works of Stephen 
Oppenheimer, "Out of Eden" and "Eden in the East". Although some of his 
material is speculative, other parts including the sea level data seem 
to be based on sound scientific evidence.

-- 
Peter Kirk
peter AT qaya.org (personal)
peterkirk AT qaya.org (work)
http://www.qaya.org/



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>>> Not "less than a thousand", but, to quote Rolf on 27th July this year:
>>>> the 1,027 examples of YIQTOL with past reference
>>> Also on 9th June 2004 he mentioned:
>>>> more than 2,000 YIQTOLs with present reference
>>
>> I don't have Tanakhic statistics at hand, but 3,000 verbs do not sound
>> like a major number. That is about 100 irregular verbs per book, a few
>> per chapter. That is a tiny percentage, indeed. Besides, I expect Rolf's
>> figures to be vastly inflated to reflect his exegetical needs.
>
> 3000 YIQTOLs is not a tiny percentage. From Rolf's figures, which can this
> far be verified from any morphological database, there are 13,619 YIQTOLs
> in the entire Hebrew Bible. This figure excludes WAYYIQTOLs and probably
> WEYIQTOLs, but probably includes jussive and cohortative forms - although
> these forms are often apocopated which indicates to me that they were
> originally a distinct verb form. As he pointed out, this means that 7.5%
> of all YIQTOLs are past. In fact 26.9% are past, present or "Present
> completed", in other words clearly non-future. There is no way that you
> can claim that more than one quarter is "a tiny percentage".
>
English irregular verbs, are they more than 27% of the total?
Your figure of 26.9% is an overestimation on two counts, as you noted: the
figure 13,619 does not include popular wayiqtols, and Rolf's 3,000 likely
includes many normal future tense yiqtols which he prefers to read as past
reference according to his views of the context.
So, ballpark, perhaps 15% of yiqtols are not straight future tense, possibly
even less. 15% for idioms and deictic shifts doesn't sound tremendous.

> I agree with you in having some concerns about Rolf's methods in
> categorising these YIQTOLs. Certainly a significant proportion of these
> cases are debatable. But if you want to seriously dispute this data, I
> suggest you go away and examine for yourself those 13,619 YIQTOLs, or at
> least the ones in a large narrative book like Genesis - I suggest a
> narrative book because in general temporal reference is clearer in
> narrative.

That would be too generous. I will just read yiqtols as future tense where
Rolf sees intricate past sense.
I offered even more stringent approach. I asked Rolf publicly for the best
cases he can bring out. And I shown that they are either:
- straight future tense,
- repeatedly encountered turns like ci-yiqtol and caasher-yiqtol (that
suggests idiomatic meaning of etymologicallly future tense, often paralleled
in Russian and, to some extent, in English), or
- emphatic speech such that is likely to contain deictic shifts.

Some difficulty in coming to the common ground arises when Hebrew uses
future case in a way intelligible to Russian speakers, but not to English.
Such is Genesis 37:15, “A man asked him, asking, What do you want (future
tense)?” Even in English, the question is oriented into the future.
Ultra-polite Russian equivalent, “Что изволите?” is future.

Just a single example of clear usage of yiqtol as past tense or imperfect
would suffice for me to retract. But something clear, like "yesterday he
yiqtol." If Rolf, with his immense experience in fishing for dubious
yiqtols, could bring just one such example, the discussion would be over.

But note that the aspects hypothesis does not explain many yiqtols, as, I
think, Rolf pointed out, too. (1Kings21:6 employs yiqtol is used for
obviously completed action: Ahab already spoke to Nabot.) Rolf quotes 1.3%
of yiqtols as future completed/ perfect, though the aspects hypothesis
considers yiqtols imperfects. Any additional number of perfects is hidden in
Rolf's categories "past" and "modal." Thus, at any rate, the tense
hypothesis is no less applicable than the aspects hypothesis.

Vadim Cherny

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