Biblical Hebrew Forum

[David Kummerow <farmerjoeblo AT hotmail.com>]

I very much agree (others won't, of course). In my view, Hebrew needs to 
be analysed in an of itself, with the categories the language itself 
distributionally reveals. Syntactic categories like "nominative" just 
don't figure in *Hebrew* syntax, at least at the diachronic stage 
represented in MT. Some even have trouble with "adjectives" in Hebrew 
(see, eg, D. J. Kamhi, "The Term tō'ar in Hebrew and Its Status as a 
Grammatical Category," BSOAS 34 (1971), 256-272; Joüon and Muraoka, §86).

In terms of general linguistics, even categories like "subject" and 
object" are not seen to be universal by some; see eg:

Dryer, Matthew S. "Are Grammatical Relations Universal?" Pages 115-143 
in Essays on Language Function and Language Type: Dedicated to T. Givón. 
Edited by Joan Bybee, John Haiman, and Sandra A. Thompson. 
Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1997.

Foley, William A. and Robert D. van Valin, Jr. "On the Viability of the 
Notion of 'Subject' in Universal Grammar." Berkeley Linguistics Society 
3 (1977): 293-320.

I realise that some theoretical positions will not accept, nor tolerate, 
such a view.

Regards,
David Kummerow.



> Thanks David for these titles;
> Of course, I only object to the use of words like accusative etc.
> because they are categories that designate usually case ending in
> Greek, Latin and German, for example, and are independent of things
> like object, subject, etc.
> For example, in one semitic language I know of, the nominal predicate
> in a verbal clause (for example "Xsubj was Ypred") has the accusative!
> Which in Greek, Latin, etc. would be unthinkable.
> So because of that reason I think descriptive grammars shouldn't
> import stuff we don't need. For example, we could say that there's a
> "dative" in a word like ??? lakhem, because it often functions in a
> similar way as "you" in "we told you". But there is no dative at all,
> there's just ? L and a suffix ?? KM. In theory there would be a
> genitive, because in some other Semitic languages all prepositions
> have what is called a genitive.
> Yours,
> Herman