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  • From: "JAMES CHRISTIAN READ" <JCR128 AT student.anglia.ac.uk>
  • To: b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [b-hebrew] Using an unpointed text
  • Date: Fri, 24 Aug 2007 10:43:07 +0100

Hi Yigal,

YL: The post below emphasizes why insisting on teaching the text without the
Masoretic points is so problematic.

JCR: It's not so much an insistence as making reading
the text unpointed more accessible to students who
recognise the linguistic benefits of doing so. A market
which seems, at present, to be uncatered for.

YL: Any native speaker of a language grows
up learning his language's grammar "naturally"

JCR: And so I am sure why you can appreciate that
learning Hebrew via a similar method would lead to
greater instinctive understanding of the text.

YL: it is only the non-native
speaker who must actually "learn" the rules.

JCR: Must? I am a non native speaker of parts of eight
modern languages. I can assure that the wrote learning
of grammar rules has had little to do with this
achievement.

YL: Compare the way in which an
American high-schooler "knows" English, with the way in which a European
teenager learns it

JCR: Yes! In a traditional classroom the student is
brainwashed with grammar rules to which there are more
exceptions than cases where the rule actually applies.
Their first attempts at speaking English generally
consist of attempts to form phrases by using poorly
pronounced versions of English words combined with
their native grammar and frequently run into confusing
situations which usually a prompt a question of the
form "But my teacher said...". After going through
this painstaking sequence they, if they are lucky,
eventually realised that the only way to master the
language is the old fashioned way, through hands on
experience, and actually start making something that
can be called progress.

YL: Speakers of Hebrew in the Iron Age and in the Second Temple Period did
not
need the nikkud - the nuances of their language came "naturally".

JCR: Please allow me to relate some of my valuable
experiences as a CELTA qualified English teacher. I
used to own a small chain of English schools in North
Italy, the Trentino-Alto Adige region to be more
specific. One of my schools was on the dolomite
mountains. An area which is a popular training ground
for Italian Olympic athletes. In my courses I had a
mix of students ranging from locals who wanted to know
a bit of English for when they were on holiday or to
speak with tourists in their own valley to dedicated
Olympic athletes who needed English as a medium of
communication for television interviews after winning
a race or event of some kind.

The athletes were typically non academic folk whose
knowledge of English was the result of hands on
experience, travelling the world and using English as
a medium of international communication with athletes
of other nations. Trying to explain grammatical
structures to these guys usually provoked the kind of
expression of strained mental effort you see from
beginning Hebrew students who are told that Hebrew
verbs do not grammaticalise tense and just can't get
their heads around the concept. Forcing the point and
insisting on teaching grammar rather than functional
language to these students is usually more detrimental
than beneficial to these students.

Yet of all the students, including your academic 'gimme
more grammar' types, they demonstrated the most
accurate understanding of English grammar by their
ability to form functional and grammatically sound
phrases in contexts which fit perfectly.

Contrast this with the case of Alberto de Chiusole, one
of my best students who was already over the age of 70
when he found his way into one of my classes. Alberto
is a very nice man and the owner of Hotel Sole,
http://www.hsole.it/ , a very nice hotel in a gorgeous
location if ever you get the chance to go. When I met
Alberto he was one the many victims of the grammatical
method of teaching and on paper in tests of
grammatical nature he outperformed everyone in the
class, including the fresh out of uni kids that had
undergone similar fruitless grammar bashings. However,
when Alberto started to speak it was painstaking. After
patiently waiting for the poor bloke to formulate and
poorly pronounce an unintelligible yet grammatically
correct phrase you had already forgotten what you had
asked him. Alberto is a rich man and he paid for and
sat through a number of expensive private lessons with
me the large focus on which were not linguistic in
nature but largely constituted in helping Alberto
understand why so much study had led to such poor
oral results. After about two years of moulding Alberto
into a language learner with good linguistic instincts
(it is not true, you can teach an old dog new tricks,
it just takes that little bit longer) it all finally
clicked into place and he started being functional
about the whole thing. He stopped insisting on talking
about grammatical forms in Italian in our lessons, let
go of his fear and started to speak in our meetings.
Shortly following this he purposefully employed two
New Zealand girls (with virtually no knowledge of
Italian) to work as Animators in his hotel. He had them
sit at his table each meal and converse with him and
the family. His improvement was exponential. Within
a matter of weeks he was rabbiting away grammatically
correct and contextually functional phrases at close
to native speed with none of the old analytical
approach to phrase formulation but relying on his
new linguistic instincts. I was both happy and sad
when Alberto stopped coming to private lessons. Happy
because of the sense of satisfaction that my job had
been done and that Alberto was now an independent
learner but at the same time sad as I had grown
accustomed to regularly meeting with Alberto and it
felt like I was losing one of my very best friends.

YL: And while
it is true that by the time of the Masoretes nobody had been a "native"
speaker of Biblical Hebrew for a thousand years (well, let's not argue about
the dates), there was an unbroken tradition of how to read the text and what
it meant. Now "unbroken" does not mean that the Masoretes pronounced every
word exactly as Isaiah would have, and of course there are mistakes and
corruptions in the Masoretic tradition, but it does mean that they had a
whole lot of knowledge, which our just throwing out the window would be
foolish.


JCR: Nobody is suggesting throwing it out of the
window. It certainly has its place as a reference
point for a workable model of pronunciation matters
but it has no role in helping students gain the
instinctive level of understanding a native Hebrew had.

YL: In a way, the Masoretes represent the transition from those who could
read
the Bible as "natives" (not in the sense that they spoke Hebrew on the
street, but that they did learn the text and its pronunciation as children),
and those who needed aids to guide their learning. The Masoretes provided
those aids. I'm sure that they can be improved upon - but assuming that we
know better and throwing them out seems nonsensical.

JCR: For me the achievement of the masoretes was that
in a time when the traditional reading of the text was
in danger of dying out and being lost entirely they
provided a reference point of what their traditional
reading was at the time. From a historical and
linguistic point of view this provides a wealth of
useful information. But as stated above, this
reference point has little use for bringing a student
to the point where he can instinctively read the
unpointed text of rich finds such as the DSS.

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






















































































provides a wealth of
useful information. But as stated above, this
reference point has little use for bringing a student
to the point where he can instinctively read the
unpointed text of rich finds such as the DSS.

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
















































































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