Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Moshe Shulman <mshulman AT ix.netcom.com>]

At 03:17 PM 6/14/2009, you wrote:
> >More practically, in real Biblical Hebrew, how could a student say
> 'The dog ate my homework' or the teacher, 'I left my notes for the
> lecture on the bus.' >
> alot of simple things can be said, actually.
> you could try the following on a gullible teacher:
> ha-kelev axal et asher katavti ba-bayit.

Of course you are talking about my grocery list and not my class 
notes. :) I would have used avodat ha-bayit, but that would not have 
been Biblical Hebrew either. (I like your Israeli pronunciation.) 
While I see it as an interesting pedagogical method, I am not sure 
you come out 'speaking' pure Biblical Hebrew. Hebrew itself developed 
from the Biblical period to the rabbinic period and later.


> > The vocabulary is quite limited. Also the
> limited tenses, might make conversation a bit difficult.>
> Yes, biblical vocabulary is quite limited. While a class might
> be controlled and led into subject matters that BH covers (we
> do that at BLC), Ullendorf has elegantly shown that the vocab is
> only a piece of the real language. ("Is biblical Hebrew a Language?")
> However, your point on the tenses would not have been accepted
> by the ancients. They certainly carried on lively conversations and
> found the verb system communicative.

I think you are minimizing the problem. The present tense is 
virtually non-existent. In fact I doubt you can find a single instance of it.

I also think that you are minimizing the pronunciation issue. With 
any language there are variances of pronunciation based on geography 
but I seriously doubt that the modern Hebrew pronunciation would have 
been understood in Biblical times.

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