Biblical Hebrew Forum

["JAMES CHRISTIAN READ" <JCR128 AT student.anglia.ac.uk>]

IF: Sorry, but I do not understand this. Is "phonetic string" the same  
bombast for 'sentence'?

JCR: Sentences are also arguably convention. At school 
I was always told off for starting sentences with 'and' 
or 'but'. But the large percentage of utterances in 
natural language that begin with 'and' or 'but' seems 
to contradict such an arbitrary convention.

IF: You go on to say "Any one hearing such a statement [namely SHAMARNU]  
would immediately wonder 'Who is the we?' and 'What did they guard?'  
Right!  This proves that SHAMARNU is meaningful since it engenders  
meaningful questions. 

JCR: I don't mean to say it is completely meaningless. 

IF: SHAMARNU consists of two words that came  
together SHAMAR and NU. Moreover, I see NU itself as consisting of  
the two words N-U, with N indication existence, and U something that  
is noisy, like me.

JCR: So were do you get the idea of plurality? With a 
cognitively oriented model of understanding such 
presents no problem. The sound 'nu' is associated with 
the cognitive concept of the speaker and associates.

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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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