Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Peter Bekins <pbekins AT fuse.net>]

> Steve,
> > Can someone please explain: What is a word-pair? Thanks.
>
> HH: The phrase can be used in different ways, such as the absolute/ 
> construct word pair relationship. But the way I am used to it is  
> with refference to Hebrew parallelism, where two nouns often occur  
> together as synonyms or a related pair. The example below mentions  
> "silver" and "gold." "Wise" and "understanding" are a frequent  
> collocation. There are many.
>
> http://www.jstor.org/pss/1517342
>
> Yours,
> Harold Holmyard

Classical Hebrew and other Semitic poetry is often structured  
according to Lowth's "parallelism of members". That is, a poetic line  
is usually a bicolon or tricolon. Each colon is a simple sentence  
comprised of 2 or 3 "members", and each member in colon 1 has a  
corresponding parallel in colon 2, etc (with different variations on  
the theme).

Usually these parallels are synonyms or antonyms, sometimes they can  
have other dynamic relationships, but often they are word-pairs. Word  
pairs are not strictly synonyms or antonyms, but they are pairs of  
words that just naturally go together in a culture. "Silver" and  
"gold" is a good example, as is "mom" and "dad", "black" and "white",  
"cat" and "dog", etc.

One interesting thing is that the order of the pair often seems to be  
fixed. You never say "gold" and "silver", "dad" and "mom", or "white"  
and "black".  I am not sure about "dog" and "cat", does anyone say  
that?. Many of these pairs cross cultures, but the order may be  
reversed. Thus in later biblical books you often find "gold and  
silver", which some scholars attribute to the influence of Aramaic as  
a sign of late biblical Hebrew.

Peter Bekins 
> From fred.putnam AT gmail.com  Sat Feb  7 10:45:20 2009
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Date: Sat, 7 Feb 2009 10:45:18 -0500
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Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] word-pairs
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In *Dynamics of Biblical Parallelism*, Adele Berlin addresses this
phenomenon by referring to research in cognitive psychology (which she
footnotes and which I have also read). [I am writing from home, and so do
not have the references to hand.] This research suggests that fixed
"word-pairs" are a subset of "word association". When a researcher asks
someone to respond with the first word that comes to mind, the responses are
very nearly fixed, with insignificant statistical variation within a
population. For example,

Researcher: "Male".
Subject: "Female".
R: "Hot".
S: "Cold".
R: "Lost".
S: "Found".
R: "Silver".
S: "Gold".
&c.

These are not particularly abstruse connections, but rather the opposite:
when asked to respond without thought, people seem to draw almost
automaticlly upon a "paired lexicon". Berlin suggests that the "word pairs"
in biblical poetry function much the same way. It is not that biblical poets
were using a special dictionary (like English "rhyming dictionaries",
specifically created for poets), but that people learn and rely upon
"default" settings.

Furthermore, when the researcher has enough data to verify the "usual"
response, and then begins with the "automatic response" words (e.g.,
"female", "cold", "found", "gold"), the correspondence does not occur in
reverse, i.e., "female" does not elicit "male", but rather "woman",
"sister", "wife", &c. [NB: These examples are not necessarily from the lit.;
they are illustrative only.]

I hope that this furthers the conversation.

Peace.

Fred


On Sat, Feb 7, 2009 at 8:49 AM, Peter Bekins <pbekins AT fuse.net> wrote:

> >
> >
> > Steve,
> >> Can someone please explain: What is a word-pair? Thanks.
> >>
> >
> > HH: The phrase can be used in different ways, such as the absolute/
> > construct word pair relationship. But the way I am used to it is
> > with refference to Hebrew parallelism, where two nouns often occur
> > together as synonyms or a related pair. The example below mentions
> > "silver" and "gold." "Wise" and "understanding" are a frequent
> > collocation. There are many.
> >
> > http://www.jstor.org/pss/1517342
> >
> > Yours,
> > Harold Holmyard
>
> Classical Hebrew and other Semitic poetry is often structured
> according to Lowth's "parallelism of members". That is, a poetic line
> is usually a bicolon or tricolon. Each colon is a simple sentence
> comprised of 2 or 3 "members", and each member in colon 1 has a
> corresponding parallel in colon 2, etc (with different variations on
> the theme).
>
> Usually these parallels are synonyms or antonyms, sometimes they can
> have other dynamic relationships, but often they are word-pairs. Word
> pairs are not strictly synonyms or antonyms, but they are pairs of
> words that just naturally go together in a culture. "Silver" and
> "gold" is a good example, as is "mom" and "dad", "black" and "white",
> "cat" and "dog", etc.
>
> One interesting thing is that the order of the pair often seems to be
> fixed. You never say "gold" and "silver", "dad" and "mom", or "white"
> and "black".  I am not sure about "dog" and "cat", does anyone say
> that?. Many of these pairs cross cultures, but the order may be
> reversed. Thus in later biblical books you often find "gold and
> silver", which some scholars attribute to the influence of Aramaic as
> a sign of late biblical Hebrew.
>
> Peter Bekins
> _______________________________________________
> b-hebrew mailing list
> b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org
> http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/b-hebrew



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Fred Putnam

Philadelphia Biblical University

215-702-4502 (office/voicemail)
215-393-9683 (home)
www.fredputnam.org (website)