Biblical Hebrew Forum

[dwashbur AT nyx.net]

On 22 Apr 2009 at 11:16, Joseph Justiss wrote:

> 
> To everyone who has responded to this issue which I raised I
> gratefully offer my thanks. Your suggestions have been very
> interesting and thought provoking. I now ask this. With all the
> disagreement and lack of consensus regarding the verbal system in BH,
> doesn't it at least force us to make a serious listen to the
> Richter's, Schneider's, and Taltra's who insist that the closest thing
> we can get to a living informant of these dead languages is the data
> gleaned from analysing the frequency and distribution of these verbal
> forms in the texts and proceed from form to function letting the data
> speak for itself? 
> 
Ostensibly, that's what we're all doing!  Thing is, analyzing frequency and 
distribution isn't 
as easy as it sounds because we have such a limited corpus.  Then there are 
situations that 
seem to be contradictory.  We don't really know what's encoded in the 
different forms, so we 
start with a hypothesis, see how well it fits the data, and go from there.  
Unfortunately, 
SOME of the data seems to fit just about any hypothesis, so you pays your 
money and you 
takes your pick.  That's one of the things that keeps this field interesting.

Dave Washburn