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  • From: Peter Bekins <pbekins AT fuse.net>
  • To: b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [b-hebrew] Using an unpointed text
  • Date: Sat, 25 Aug 2007 12:27:16 -0400

Others have written:

>>KG: This idea might sound silly, but a person could learn to read Biblical
>>Hebrew without the vowels like a deaf person learns to read and understand a
>>language without imagining any sounds connected to the words.

>>You can just see the letters as words, and recognize what the words mean
>>without any sound connected to the letters. If a person wants to read
>>Biblical Hebrew, and has no plans to speak the language, then he or she can
>>look at the letters without the words representing sounds. The meanings of
>>the words could be understand by each person in his or her own language. If
>>deaf people can do it, then a hearing person could do it, but it would feel
>>strange.

>>Do you have to speak or even hear a language to know how to read a language?

>>JCR: It doesn't sound strange to me. What you say makes
>>perfect sense. All reading is is the association of
>>images on a page with cognitively understood concepts
>>in the brain. The reason why this could sound strange
>>to some people is because the Hebrew writing system,
>>like many other writing systems, is a phonetic attempt
>>at representing meaning.

>>But if we were to consider pictoral writing systems
>>like Egyptian hieroglyphics or Mandarin/Cantonese
>>pictograms as an example then it may be easier for
>>people to understand the validity of your suggestion.

This is what worries me a little about this "unpointed text" issue. I read both pointed and unpointed text, and I completely agree that reading unpointed text is an important exercise. However, including the previously cited SBL article, the approach to teaching from an unpointed text seems to me to be a shortcut to actually reading Hebrew. Instead it is a method of direct translation into English from Hebrew consonants. I.e., you see DBR, guess from context whether it should be a verb or noun, tag it in your brain with some sort of meta-language as DBR-noun, and move immediately to "word, thing" without ever comprehending "dabar".

Now if you want to argue about how it was actually pronounced, that is a different issue, but if you move directly to "word" without ever actually using some sort of Hebrew word, however you want to pronounce it, then in my opinion you haven't actually read anything, you are just doing ad-hoc translation. There are many reasons why this is dangerous in practice.

Further, Gelb argued very hard to use the term logogram instead of ideogram for describing both cuneiform and heiroglyphics. A symbol does not represent an abstract idea, but a specific word. This is seem most directly in the use of phonetic complements to explicitly mark what word the scribe meant to be read.

Michael O'Connor argued that writing properly belongs to the field of Semiotics rather than linguistics, I am not sure if I fully agree but I see his point. The relationship between writing and speech is difficult to define. However, when we read as native speakers we generally read lexically. By this I mean we see a group of letters together as a sign representing a single word, we don't move through each letter phonetically to sound them out. In this sense, James, I think it is entirely proper to make your analogy between a heiroglyphic "picture"-sign and a group of Hebrew consonants, however in both cases the sign does not represent an abstract idea, but an actual word from the language. In this way, written language uses different sorts of phonetically based symbols (logograms-syllabic signs-"letter"-signs) to leverage spoken language as a means of communication.

In short, it is my opinion that if you are reading unpointed text, but not coming up with some sort of pronunciation, and instead moving directly to English, you are not really reading but ad-hoc translating. The goal of reading unpointed text is to be able to read lexically without being slowed down by moving through all of the vowel points phonetically. And of course there are all sorts of exceptions and nuances to be made to my distinction between "reading" and "ad-hoc translating" so take it as a general statement.

Peter Bekins






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