Biblical Hebrew Forum

["K Randolph" <kwrandolph AT gmail.com>]

Dear James:

I want to get back to this question:

On 8/23/07, JAMES CHRISTIAN READ <JCR128 AT student.anglia.ac.uk> wrote:
> KWR: Getting back to teaching unpointed Biblical Hebrew, the biggest
> challenge that I can see is in teaching students to recognize the
> different binyanim. In teaching Masoretic Hebrew, we can say "This set
> of points define a Qal, and this other set a Piel" and so forth, but
> without the points, the difference between the Qal, Piel, even many
> Hiphils, Hophals, Niphals, etc. will have to be recognized by their
> function in context as their consonantal forms are often identical.
> Have you given any thought to this question? How would one teach to
> recognize those functions? Have you given any thought to teaching
> students to recognize functions?
>
> JCR: If we are to make the assumption that the aim of
> the course is to bring the student to an instinctive
> reading of the text similar to that of a native Hebrew
> then I would make the following observation.
>
While my goal is to bring students up to similar to native speaker
ability, realistically only a few will be able to approach this level.

> The level of analysis of the Hebrew verb system we
> refer to as the Qal, Hiphil etc. is the invention of
> medieval Hebrew grammarians and while useful for a
> high level analysis of the language provides little use
> for understanding the text.

Here's where I disagree, because these functional rules are not found
in Western languages, a person learning Hebrew would not know to look
for them unless taught to. By not explicitly teaching them, are you
expecting students to learn these functions through osmosis? If I were
a student, I would be very, very frustrated!

> ... I would suggest that your
> average native Hebrew had little more than a passive
> understanding of these forms and was more concerned
> with the meaning of words in context than in their
> actual form and in the grammatical conventions used
> (none used at that time to the best of my knowledge) to
> describe them.
>
No, as far as I know, there were no formal rule books to learn from,
but there were parents, family and friends to provide corrections
hourly over many years. We have neither the native speaker context,
and most students don't have the time either. Those are the reasons we
need to make shortcuts, such as explicitly teaching the functional
rules that have been grammaticalized in Biblical Hebrew, but not in
our native tongues.

Biblical Hebrew grammaticalized the active, stative and causative with
their passives and the reflexive: which Western language does that?
Furthermore, there is often no textual clue other than the context to
tell us which is which. By not warning students of the possible
grammaticalizations, are you not setting them up for a fall and
greater frustration?

> I would therefore treat these consonants as any other
> combination of consonants which have multiple possible
> pronunciations. I would leave the context to dictate
> the correct pronunciation and therefore the meaning.

But how would students know which pronunciation to choose, unless they
have been taught that these different pronunciations exist and the
functional differences that the different pronunciations make? This is
especially important when reading the unpointed text where the
consonants could take several different functions/pronunciations
depending on the context.

> This is why I feel that my n-grams are such useful
> units of teaching. They are ready made natural lexical
> chunks that can already provide enough collational
> evidence to make the decision.
>
I don't know about that. Biblical Hebrew seems to have had very few
complex lexemes, where two or more words work together to give a third
meaning. Usually when I look at context, I consider the whole verse,
sometimes several verses, to establish which root and
function/pronunciation to look for. Usually when reading the text, I
have the context in mind by the time I reach a difficult word and
often, without conscious thought, choose the root and
function/pronunciation that fit the context while rejecting other
roots and functions that don't.

> .... The main
> problem with second language learning is that in the
> process of associating target language labels with
> first language labels the student is running the risk
> of falling into traps of assuming that there is a
> 100% 1:1 mapping of concepts.

Agreed.

> .... Another problem with this
> method of learning is that it inhibits the student's
> ability to start thinking in the target language
> because instead of going from:
>
> cognitive understanding -> audible label
>
> they go from:
>
> cognitive understanding -> audible label in first language -> audible label 
> in target language
>
> and so are taught from the very outset to translate
> mentally rather than to understand directly.
>
Unfortunately, once a person already has certain ideas as to how
languages operate because of his familiarity with his own language,
any second language that he learns he will be comparing it with his
primary language. "If I want to express the function of going in
language  X  , how would I do it?" If the second language has
grammaticalized functions that are not grammaticalized in one's
primary language, the student should be taught the grammaticalizations
so that he does not suffer shipwreck on a reef that he does not know
about. Unfortunately, this has a translation stage that too many never
get out of.

Having learned a few languages, I tend to go through the translation
stage more quickly than first time students. You probably do too. One
of the things that helps me get through the translation stage more
quickly is learning basic grammar as one of the first things to learn,
then adding on more rules only as I get to more complex functions of
meaning.

>
> Perhaps, a mix of images and first language equivalents
> would be the best way forward. What do you think?
>
Pictures help, but when we deal with adults, how useful?

> Anyway, I forgot to mention pronunciation. Perhaps the
> first chapter should be dedicated to syllable
> pronunciation. Traditional grammar tend to deal with
> pronunciation on a per letter basis but I feel that
> this betrays the natural mechanisms of phonetic
> training. In every language I know of natural phonetic
> training consists of phonetic training at the syllable
> level. Perhaps our course should also follow this
> tried and tested model.
>
The problem we are dealing here with is written, not spoken, language.
Sometimes the rules of learning are different.

In Western languages which were/sometimes still are phonetically
written, the progression is letter -> syllable -> word -> sentence. In
languages which were written with syllabaries, then the progression of
learning to read is syllable -> word -> sentence. Learning to read
languages written with ideograms, such as Chinese, is virtually the
same as learning a second language.

As for Biblical Hebrew, we don't know and we may never know how it was
pronounced, nor the exact correlation between writing and spelling.
All we can do is muddle through. But by teaching the grammaticalized
functions and their possible spellings (reading Biblical Hebrew is
more difficult because of the fluid spelling), do we not at least give
students basic rules that will help them learn?

> Any thoughts? Feelings?
>
> 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

See above for thoughts.

Yours, Karl W. Randolph.