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b-hebrew - Re: [b-hebrew] WAYYIQTOL/YIQTOL/WEYIQTOL [was Kamatz katan; ...was: Translating]

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  • From: rochelle altman <willaa AT netvision.net.il>
  • To: b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] WAYYIQTOL/YIQTOL/WEYIQTOL [was Kamatz katan; ...was: Translating]
  • Date: Tue, 10 Oct 2006 23:56:59 +0200

Karl,

> I did not state that BH as we have it shows all the forms.
>
> I do know that the Paleo- frags among the DSS use variant forms.
>
But even the oldest DSS post date by centuries the changes that
Aramaic imposed on Hebrew by the fact (as I read it) that the
returnies were more at home in Aramaic than Hebrew.

Those Paleo-Hebraic fragments are old. May even antedate the exile. Cross dubbed the scripts "Herodian" and "Hasmonean." The names should be "formal (or Book) Square Script and cursive square script. The cursive families appear at Elephantine in the 5th BCE.

> Corrupted? .... You can't call that "corrupted." A living language changes; Hebrew was a
> living language at the period you are talking about.
>
Depends on how you define "living language".

Only a small percentage of the peoples was sent into exile: the elite -- the troublemakers in J'lem. Then, the peoples at Elephantine never went into exile. And there were others outside the country. So, the elitists returnees spoke Aramaic as well as Hebrew..And? That means that the language died right then and there with their return? What about the Genizah documents in Hebrew. What about secular poetry written in Hebrew as late as the 10th-century CE. What about the Sephardic Jews that went to the Lowlands from Spain; they spoke and wrote Hebrew, you know. For heaven's sake, look at the commentaries written in Hebrew. Dead Language? Just because the Ashkenazim didn't use Hebrew except for religious purposes does not mean that every Jew stopped speaking Hebrew as one of his or her languages.

It's fairly standard for folks living in a country where another language is used daily to speak one language at home and another on the street.All my sons are polyglots and so are my grandchildren..So, yes, I am quite familiar with the effects of an "outside" language on inside the home languages.And I know that they are not as great as you seem to think they would be when the languages are from different families. The linguistic shifts are greater when the languages are cousins, though -- and it can go either way.

uestion that's been floated out here is how far back does
> the use of ADONAI go? From the meter, well, it's used in pre-Monarchial
> psalms... so. I'd hazard 12th-11th-centuries BCE at the very least.
>
I've seen this as an argument for a tri-syllabic pronunciation of YHWH
(I personally think that the W is the mater lectionis).

Then you will have to account for the tri-syllabic meter in every occurrence throughout the Psalms.

>
> Best regards,
>
> Rochelle

Maybe I should have been more clear about "corrupted". Most of the
time when I think of "corrupted" in this context, I refer to changes
that new influences had on Biblical Hebrew so that it was no longer
the language of David, Isaiah, even Jeremiah. There are two major
changes: 1) the pronunciation, the returnies pronounced the language
according to the Aramaic pronunciations of the alphabet, not
necessarily the Hebrew pronunciation from pre-exilic times, and 2) a
simpler, more direct use of the language than that employed by
pre-exilic writers such as Isaiah, Jeremiah, Psalms, Proverbs and
others. I observe both changes.

1) we don't know how much the pronunciation shifted.

2) More likely there were no really gifted authors around. Just middling talents.Besides, Jeremiah wrote literary Hebrew -- he was a real show-off, he was. Isaiah was a 'memory man,' and memory men were trained poets as well as custodians of cultural values.The Psalms vary from multi-layered, mutli-vocal, complex works, such as the Davidic Psalms, to the almost folk songs of the pre-monarchial period. to the works of various trained composers. The really old psalms are not complex..

Where do you place Kohelet on this scale? The work does indicate a
gifted.poet.

Try backing off from thinking of the bible as "Holy scripture" and try to think of them as works as literature. .

BTW, "holy" (halig) means healthy, whole, complete. "Healthy Scriptures." -- just a thought.

Those are also indications that Hebrew
was no longer learned at one's mother's knees, but living in the same
manner as Latin is still a living language.

See my comments above. As an Ashkenazi, I only learned about the continuity and use of Hebrew as a living language among the Sephardic communities after I married into a family that had been in the Lowlands since the 12th-century.It was quite an eye-opener.

Which leads me back to my original question, what evidence is there
that there were four waws/vavs in pre-exilic Biblical Hebrew? I know
of no pre-exilic epigraphic evidence for it.

Again, I didn't say we had any examples of four vavs in pre-exilic Hebrew --- unless those Paleo frags are pre-exilic. I said we had Phoenician, Moabite, and Aramaic inscriptions that display variant forms.I also mentioned that MT frags in formal square script have variant forms, as those are ca.2nd BCE and follow the MT anyway ....Please don't expand what I say beyond the boundaries I carefully stated...


Yours, Karl W. Randolph.

Sincerely,

Rochelle I.S. Altman





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