Biblical Hebrew Forum

[David Kummerow <farmerjoeblo AT hotmail.com>]

Hi Karl,

See below:

> 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.

You are only taking a few isolated examples I cited. I don't have time 
to research more for you, but you could read some of the grammars and 
get more examples. Also, do a search for Hithpael of halak -- hardly any 
with fit your idiomatic use above, instead meaning "to walk about/to and 
fro". But then you aren't open to these ideas...

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

Of course they're not from the same language family. That's the whole 
point. Haven't you ever heard of linguistic typology? Look back over the 
essay I cited before and Anstey's article from Hebrew Studies.

> 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.

They perhaps have done much more extensive grammatical study of Hebrew 
than you, so you should be open to listening to them. You say they're 
wrong without even reading them! I think they could be wrong, but then 
I've read them and that's different. If you don't have access, buy them 
like I did. They're worth the money. On the Niphal, Boyd's work is 
exhaustive. In my opinion, it is the best treatment of the Niphal to 
date, and you ignore it to your detriment. I'll say no more.


> 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.
>
> .

Yes it's worth a lot I think.

Regards,
David Kummerow.