Biblical Hebrew Forum

["K Randolph" <kwrandolph AT gmail.com>]

Dear David:

On 3/29/07, David Kummerow <farmerjoeblo AT hotmail.com> wrote:
> Hi Karl,
>
> That's for you to decide. Personally, I don't hold to the principle that
> there must be a "single, basic meaning that makes it easier to recognize
> and appreciate non-standard uses." That is, I prefer to see prototypical
> meaning, which is just that -- prototypical. Often it will equate to
> your "single, basic meaning", but it doesn't have to.
Well, I don't know what to call it. It is a methodology that I first
developed as a teen to learn modern languages, but never really
stopped to try to explain the method until recently.

> So it's for you to decide how you choose what fits your "single, basic
> meaning" and what doesn't. For the Hithpael, you seem to take the
> single, basic meaning to be reflexive, so all the other uses I presented
> have to some how be forced under this meaning rather than the
> non-reflexive uses of the Hithpael simply seen for what they are:
> non-reflexive uses.

Personally, I think it is more forced to try to count those uses as
other than reflexive. Especially as none of the examples that you
presented have other than a reflexive meaning. As I showed in a longer
post, there was no reciprocity meant in a somewhat hyperbolic
statement where Jacob scolded his sons. Even as an American with
American English his native tongue, I read "I made myself go before
him all my life", or in better English, "I made my way before him
...", as an idiomatic use of "go" to refer to living one's life, so
the "grooming/body motion" is far from the main meaning, but the
reflexive is clearly seen. In the final example, the use is somewhat
poetic, "insight hides itself" is grammatically the reading, a
grammatical reading that is clearly reflexive, even the concordance
that I use lists it as reflexive: only by redefining the verb to a one
time used meaning can one get other than a reflexive reading; rather
forced I say.

The French and Russian examples are not even from the same language
family, and don't fit.

This gets back to lexicography: does a lexeme have a meaning that can
be recognized and applied across multiple semantic domains, or does
each semantic domain redefine a lexeme so that a lexeme can have
multiple meanings? I choose the former. The latter, taken to its
logical conclusion, makes words basically undefined: how can we trust
communications with undefined words?

It also gets back to how we consider the ancients: were they relative
simpletons who seldom used other than direct discourse, or did their
writings exhibit the full gamut of literary style as do modern
writings, such as hyperbole, euphemism, idiom,  and so forth?

> .... Sure, there's conceptualisation happening here:
> "reflexive" is close to "reciprocal" and "grooming/body motion".
> "Anticausative" seems to sit mid-way between "reflexive" and "passive",
> but meaning can extend from "antipassive" to "generic passive" (cf
> French "se") and also to "passive" (cf Russian "-sja"). So if a
> reflexive morpheme etc extends its meaning to anticausative it can then
> extend to generic passive and then to passive. If Waltke and O'Connor
> are correct in their analysis, the Hithpael even can express passive. As
> for the Niphal, it is perhaps debatable whether it is a true reflexive
> (cf Steven W. Boyd, "A Synchronic Aanalysis of the
> Medio-Passive-Reflexive in Biblical Hebrew" [PhD diss., Hebrew Union
> College, 1993], but it certainly is used to express middle and passive
> functions, neither of which, for me, can successfully be attributed to a
> single, basic meaning of "middle" or "passive".
>
> Regards,
> David Kummerow.
Who are Waltke and O'Connor that I should listen to them? Before
joining this list I never heard of them. How much of what they say is
based on Hebrew alone, and how much on translation conventions on how
best to render the meanings in English? The same questions for Steven
W. Boyd.

As one who is largely self-taught in Hebrew, I know I lack many of the
credentials expected of scholars nor do I know the big names in the
field, but at the same time, I notice that I have a feel for the
language that many scholars seem to lack. I have read the text
probably 20+ times and memorized chapters. How can such not
internalize the language in ways that transcend formal study?

Karl W. Randolph.