Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Stephen and Rebecca Shead <srshead AT gmail.com>]

Good question, Stoney, I asked myself exactly the same thing. In Spanish you
would say "undulating hills" (colinas ondulantes).

And a follow-up for Jim Stinehart: Do you realise how much of a semantic
leap is required to get from the verb "roll" to the idiom "rolling hills"?
It is by no means an obvious metaphor - I'd be very surprised if it was
particularly common cross-linguistically. "Undulating hills" seems far more
obvious to me, and more likely to be prevalent cross-linguistically. "Roll"
is a type of movement associated with round objects, and whatever hills do,
they do not "roll"! They don't even looking like a rolling thing. But when
you scan your eyes along hills of a certain kind, it does look like they "go
up and down" - a very different type of movement.

Now it's not too hard to imagine how the English idiom might have arisen.
But my point is that it is actually a very strange expression. So EVEN IF
all your other linguistic arguments about GRR, GLL, GRGR, GLGL and GLYL hold
water (and I'm not going to go there at this stage), a semantic connection
"GRR roll --> the rolling hills" seems very unlikely to me, and it's
certainly not a strong linguistic argument unless there's evidence for the
metaphor somewhere else.

Stephen Shead
Santiago, Chile

---------- Forwarded message ----------
> From: "Stoney Breyer" <stoneyb AT touchwoodcreative.com>
> To: <b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org>
> Date: Wed, 27 May 2009 09:24:00 -0500
> Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] theories and standards: Rolling hills
> Does any language other than English known to members of this list employ
> the metaphor "rolling hills"?
>
> Stoney Breyer
> Writer/Touchwood
>