Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Yitzhak Sapir" <yitzhaksapir AT gmail.com>]

On 8/25/07, JAMES CHRISTIAN READ wrote:
> YS: Your sentences are contrived.  For example, take the last one --
> why would anyone need to add a whole new sentence except to
> make up for the missing vowels in your contrived example?  And
> why don't you have the entire sentence without vowels?  "thy lft
> mss n a bskt n th rvr btwen th rds", "tht by s s rd. h nvr sys thnk
> y fr nthng."
>
> JCR: I just new you were going to say that ;-)
>
> I cordially invite you to demonstrate how many
> ambiguous meanings "thy lft mss n a bskt n th rvr btwen
> th rds" and "tht by s s rd. h nvr sys thnk
> y fr nthng." I'll even grant you leaving the maters
> lectionis out of 'nthing' and 'in' and 'rivr'.

James, like I wrote earlier, several other important objections are
that the above sentences are not from a closed corpus and you
have access to native speakers of the language.  These are
significant differences that mean the two cases cannot be
compared.  If you are arguing that a person can write and read
such a text if he has access to native speakers and an open
corpus, I have no disagreement.  It is obvious this is what the
native speaking scribes among the Judaeans did.

Yitzhak Sapir