Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Herman Meester <crazymulgogi AT gmail.com>]

I'm sorry for that; I thought that by replying to you, it
automatically went to b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org too? Mailig list
technology is beyond me ;)

2005/11/21, kgraham0938 AT comcast.net <kgraham0938 AT comcast.net>:
>
> Hey Herman, do you mind sending this to B-Hebrew?  My computer won't make
> out your Hebrew so I can't read it.    You just sent this to me, just copy
> and paste the B Hebrew address and send it in and when it gets to the site I
> can read your Hebrew.  Thanks
>
> --
> Kelton Graham
> KGRAHAM0938 AT comcast.net
>
> -------------- Original message --------------
>
> > PS I'm sorry Kelton for writing your name without a capital, I never
> > hold the Shift key long enough.
> >
> >
> > 2005/11/21, Herman Meester :
> > > > > SM: Why make such a strange contortion? If the qal verb is "cry",
> the
> > > > > straightforward causative would be "caused me to cry". Also you've
> changed
> > > > > the direct object, me, into an indirect object.
> > >
> > > >KGraham said:
> > > > Response: I might be going out on a limb here, but this could be a
> datival
> > accusative. Where a pronoun is the direct object where one would expect a
> > dative.
> > >
> > > dear kelton, Steve, others interested,
> > > In Biblical Hebrew, there is no visible nominative, genitive, dative,
> > > accusative, ablative or any other kind of case ending for which we use
> > > Latin words, because they are Latin/Greek, i.e. Indo-European terms.
> > > Let alone a "datival accusative". Imagine we would suppose there were
> > > indeed case endings someday in Hebrew (which is likely), like in
> > > Arabic there still are in poetry for example, then we could easily
> > > prove that in the biblical phase of Hebrew they died out.
> > >
> > > We have for example words like לילה láyla "night" with penultimate
> > > stress, which is in fact ליל layl/leyl, with what we could term a
> > > "locative" case ending suffixed. The same thing we see in הביתה
> > > habbáyta "home". לילה layla has a fossilised/ossified
> > > ((?)PS what word would we use in English? It's not my native language)
> > > "locative" ending, so it had once meant "at night", but because לילה
> > > "at night" was apparently used more often in the language than ליל
> > > "night" in its normal form, eventually לילה became the normal word for
> > > "night."
> > > We can thus say that case endings were/are no longer there when most
> > > texts were composed.
> > >
> > > Why all this? Isn't this all purely academic?
> > > I think not; once we establish, like traditional grammars do, that את
> > > is the particle for the object, which in Greek/Latin is usually given
> > > expression for nouns with the accusative, we tend to move on a little
> > > too enthusiastically, and end up with a particle that expresses
> > > "accusative", which is nonsense for Hebrew. As a result, we mix up
> > > source language and Hebrew too, when we translate, because often our
> > > languages are described by means of the same traditional Greek/latin
> > > grammars.
> > > Like Steve asked, if you translate אתי "to me", don't you turn a
> > > Hebrew direct object into an English indirect object? (of course, he
> > > didn't use Latin case names ;) ) Well, that is exactly where the two
> > > languages have little or nothing to do with each other: an ancient
> > > Israelite wouldn't have an idea what we are talking about: to him, the
> > > את [et] in אתי [oti] is simply a preposition, like על [(al] or other
> > > prepositions. There are examples where it seems not to matter whether
> > > or not את [et] is used in case of a definite noun that has the
> > > function of object. But in case of ויוזעק אתי wayyaz(eq )oti here,
> > > the only alternative is a suffix: ויזעק� י wayyaz(aqeni (or something
> > > like that). Here it is את [et], a preposition, not strictly speaking a
> > > direct object, which most likely would have been with a suffix (if we
> > > would want to define it all in these terms).
> > > What we should do, we have to look at the actual way the
> > > particles/prepositions work in the Hebrew language, without importing
> > > these foreign categories. The word את first of all seems so have a
> > > complicated way of suffix attachment; we have both אותי oti and אתי
> > > itti (etc.), which seems to be the same word את. In the case of אתי
> > > itti the usual meaning is "with me", whereas אותי oti is commony
> > > understand as "me (object)". Can we then say that אותי "must" always
> > > expresses an object "me"?
> > > That might be what we had our grammar books teach us. However, these
> > > books are based on the very MT we use and were we find this example of
> > > אתי oti that doesn't fit our grammars exactly.
> > > Now we can do two things; we can adapt our MT to our grammars and find
> > > all sorts of complex explanations using "datival accusatives" and
> > > things like that; or we can adapt our grammars to our MT, saying,
> > > apparently the grammars have missed this example where את [et] (אתי
> > > oti) introduces the addressed person as a complement to the verb הזעיק
> > > hiz(iq.
> > > I prefer the latter alternative.
> > > Looking forward to your comments,
> > >
> > > Regards,
> > > Herman
> > >