Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Peter Kirk <peter AT qaya.org>]

On 22/11/2005 21:49, B. M. Rocine wrote:

> ...
>
>
> Judge the diction against the targetted audience.  It is not he kind of 
> Bible you take to church.  It is big, thick, expensive, and a third or 
> more of the book is commentary.  Is all of this a clue to what the book 
> is about?  It is a translation for a pretty educated crowd, the kind 
> that would be intrigued with "welter" and willing to look it up if they 
> have to.
>  

Fair enough, if the target is a very specialised group as with NWT.
...

> As for whether all the words in narrative parts of the Bible are 
> familiar words, we have no way of judging that.  ;-)
>  

Well, we can judge something from the sheer number of different words. 
The number of words in the narrative parts is probably less than a 
typical native speaker's vocabulary. That suggests that the great 
majority of these words are familiar ones, although it can't tell us 
about every individual word.

> We *have* a way of judging whether _bohu_ is unfamiliar.  It has an 
> elusive etymology.  It only appear three times in the Bible, always in 
> conjunction with the more familiar word tohu, and twice as a veritable 
> allusions to the first in Gen. 1:2.  It rhymes with _tohu_.  Alter's 
> suggestion that _bohu_ may be a "nonce word coined to rhyme with 
> [_tohu_]" seems plausible.  I don't say *probable*; plausible.
>
>  
Most languages have such doublets, often written with hyphens, e.g. 
English "helter-skelter", where one element or both is not an 
independent word. But that doesn't in fact affect the issue, which 
becomes whether the particular doublet was well understood.

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