Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Karl Randolph" <kwrandolph AT email.com>]

Harold:

The moment that you can "stick in an alternative 
interpretation", especially when that alternative 
interpretation is linguistically allowable, then 
you cannot insist that your interpretation is the 
only correct one.

How do you define "best interpretation"? What 
objective standards do you adduce?

As a lexicographer, how do you decide what a term 
means? How do you recognize when a word is being 
used in a non-standard way, such as in literary 
styles as irony, satire, idiomatic phrase, etc.? Do 
you agree that a word can have its own meaning and 
its opposite (which would make a term meaningless) 
or do you analyze the context to control for 
literary style and/or time based change of meaning?

When I wrote my dictionary, I noticed almost no 
change in meaning from Moses to the Exile, though 
there was an increasing complexity of literary 
style for the later pre-Exile writing as Isaiah and 
Jeremiah, as compared to earlier writings as Exodus 
through Deuteronomy, and middle works as Psalms and 
Proverbs. Then the post-Exile writings were 
stylistically much simpler with more loan words, as 
typical of people for whom Hebrew was their second 
language, exemplified by such works as Kings, 
Chronicles, Ezra, Nehemiah, etc. I looked first for 
a unified meaning that fits in all uses. If I found 
words that were very different in their meanings, I 
looked for possible time-based changes, whether or 
not we may be dealing with a loan-word from another 
language, I read up to a whole chapter per use 
looking for contextual clues of literary styles 
that would indicate non-standard use of the terms 
and compare them with synonyms (my dictionary lists 
over 1600 such) and sometimes antonyms to get the 
best handle I could on a term's meaning.

In short, I consider one variant meaning that can't 
be explained by literary style, loan word, part of 
a complex lexeme (two or more words working 
together to make a third meaning) or change over 
time sufficient to look for an alternate unified 
meaning for a term. Even then I recognize that 
sometimes we deal with different terms that just 
happen to be spelled the same.

The only evidence that you have presented that MW(D 
could possibly include the four seasons have 
legitimate alternate interpretations that others 
think are stronger than your claims. Your evidence 
is too weak to convince. You need to cite a verse 
where it can have no other meaning.

Karl W. Randolph.


> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Harold Holmyard" <hholmyard AT ont.com>
> 
> Karl Randolph wrote:
> 
> > In order for you to convince me that MW(D means "season" as in 
> > summer, fall, etc., you need to cite a verse where it can have no 
> > other meaning. This you have failed to do. All you have presented 
> > are idiosyncratic readings of very few verses.
> >
> >
> 
> HH: This is an illegitimate criterion because it may be possible to
> stick in an alternative interpretation. The question becomes what the
> best interpretation is. Demanding that there can only be one possible
> interpretation is an invalid approach because in many difficult passages
> there can more than one possible meaning for a word.
> 
> Yours,
> Harold Holmyard

-- 
___________________________________________________
Play 100s of games for FREE! http://games.mail.com/