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  • From: "JAMES CHRISTIAN READ" <JCR128 AT student.anglia.ac.uk>
  • To: b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [b-hebrew] quotes with uncertain Hebrew meanings
  • Date: Thu, 23 Aug 2007 19:42:58 +0100

KWR. In my dictionary, I list by electronic count 721 words where the
linguistic data is insufficient for us to be certain of their
meanings.

JCR: Hi Karl, is your electronic lexicon available? What languages does it
currently support? Is it English only at the moment? I wouldn't mind having a
play with it by your permission.

KG: I saw a Tanakh once with footnotes that said "Hebrew meaning is
uncertain"
about quotes on almost every page of the book. Does anyone know how many
quotes in the Tanakh have uncertain Hebrew meanings? From looking at that
book, I would guess there were one or two thousand quotes like that.

JCR: Hi Kenneth, you may take my opinion as an extreme
view but I would call into question the meaning of
every single word in the Hebrew corpus until you have
justifiable linguistic reasons for accepting its
meaning:

i) contextual harmony
ii) traditional understanding
iii) cognate testimony
iv) etymological reasons

I put the list in the order above purposefully because
that is the order in which, I personally, would weigh
the evidence. As already discussed at length recently,
etymology is the shakiest of evidences and is usually
used as a last resort and any semantics derived from
it should be thoroughly tested by the contextual
harmony method and even then be thoroughly distrusted.

My parsing of the Aleppo Codex revealed an alarmingly
large size of words which only occur once. Of course,
many of these are from roots which are more heavily
attested but even so you can imagine the difficulty of
lexicographically proving the suggested semantic role
of any word which only occurs once in the entire
corpus. With only one context to be tested in there is
a very limited scope for testing its meaning. We
therefore fall back on tradition (not very scientific
but more helpful than merely giving up). Cognates
which are more heavily attested in their respective
languages offer limited linguistic help because of the
false friend scenario where similar words have
different meanings e.g. consider Italian 'negozio'
meaning 'shop'. When I started learning Spanish by the
full immersion method my natural instinct was to assume
that 'negocio' is also shop but Spanish shop is
'tienda' which is cognate of Italian 'tenda' which
means tent. It is easy to see how such came about. In
the good old days of Latin markets shops were probably
basically tents with goods in them. The Spanish
'negocios' is used in talking about the economy and
there is a popular Spanish program 'Hablamos de
negocios' - Let's talk about the economy, or something
like that.

And so it easy to see how cognates can be quite
misleading before we even get on to how misleading
etymology can be.

However, not wishing to be too gloomy, the vast
of the gist meaning of the Hebrew corpus rests on the
shoulders of reliable lexicography and a workable
semantic framework of the language which is provable
by reading words in context to test out their suggested
meaning. My online concordance of the Aleppo Codex is
useful for playing these little linguistic games of
semantic verification.

I haven't read Karl's lexicon yet but it sounds like
he has put a lot of honest work into it. His figures
are probably, therefore, not too far from the
linguistic truth of the matter. My knowledge of Hebrew
as a language is evidently far inferior to his and so I
am not in as good a position to give any reliable
figures.

James Christian Read - BSc Computer Science
http://www.lamie.org/hebrew - thesis1: concept driven machine translation
using the Aleppo codex
http://www.lamie.org/lad-sim.doc - thesis2: language acquisition simulation




























































































far from the
linguistic truth of the matter. My knowledge of Hebrew
as a language is evidently far inferior to his and so I
am not in as good a position to give any reliable
figures.

James Christian Read - BSc Computer Science
http://www.lamie.org/hebrew - thesis1: concept driven machine translation
using the





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