Biblical Hebrew Forum

[jmlineb AT comcast.net (John M. Linebarger)]

I am a lurker on b-hebrew but more active on b-greek, and I am struck by the 
difference between the two groups.  There is much more controversy on 
b-hebrew, which is not necessarily positive or interesting.  The most recent 
exchange between Isaac Fried and David Kummerow is a case in point.

Quite frankly, speaking only for myself, what I find tedious is Isaac's 
persistent refusal either to study linguistics or to accept its results as 
being normative for that discipline.  Isaac appears to wish that lingistics 
was much more like mathematics, but it is not.  So he appears to fight it 
instead of accepting it and working within it.  As a result, what he puts 
forward often appears to be gibberish to the linguistics community.  If the 
goal is to change the field of linguistics, a prerequisite would appear to be 
both an understanding of it and a willingness to use its medium of discourse 
to communicate the need for change.

My humble request is that  unprofitable exchanges like this latest one either 
be minimized or eliminated in future.  A ground rule for posting would appear 
to be a willingness to express oneself in commonly accepted terms of 
discourse in the linguistic community.  Failure to do that is simply a 
conscious choice not to be understood, which dooms the communication to be 
ineffective at the start.

John M. Linebarger
PhD Computer Science (so Hebrew and linguistics are avocations, not vocations)
Albuquerque, NM