Biblical Hebrew Forum

[K Randolph <kwrandolph AT gmail.com>]

Randall:

On Tue, Jun 16, 2009 at 9:23 AM, Randall Buth<randallbuth AT gmail.com> wrote:
> Karl Randolph posted a response to my other question that really
> belongs here:
>
>>Biblical Hebrew hasn’t been spoken for two and a half millennia, so in
>> that case it is a “dead” language. So which pronunciation would one
>> use in class? Eastern European? Yemeni? Modern Israeli? Does it
>> make a difference?
>
> An interesting claim that BH hasn't been spoken for 2500 years.

Because it was a side issue, I didn’t go into detail of what was
meant. More accurately, the last generation that all can agree to as
to having spoken Biblical Hebrew as its mother tongue died out ca.
2500 years ago. All later claims are disputable, and disputed.

> (Phonology is really a side issue. I know people with mother-tongue
> English who speak with a "non-English" pronunciation.)
> Strictly speaking, this claims that prophets like Zexarya and Haggai
> or Ezra and the author of Esther did not speak Biblical Hebrew.
> Yes, they wrote their books, and these were read outloud, and their
> publication usually parallels a spoken and or public ministry or
> public recitation.
>
Again the parallel to Latin comes up. There are still people who can
carry on conversations in Latin even though no one has spoken Latin as
his mother tongue for well over 1000 years. 150 years ago, the ability
to carry on a conversation in Latin was still considered a sign of an
educated person.

Likewise the knowledge of Hebrew was considered the sign of an
educated Jew, including the ability to speak it and understanding the
spoken word. But does that necessarily include that Hebrew was the
language of the market and at the hearth? There are those who say
“No.”

> Presumably, this claim referred to a mother-tongue? It could also raise
> an amusing situation of a prophet speaking to the people in a language
> not understood?! (Incidentally, the comment by NeHemya about children
> of foreigners who spoke Phoenician (Ashdodit), et al, implies that children
> of Jewish mothers spoke Hebrew/Yehudit).

This can be taken in more than one way, including that those men who
married those other women were not training their children even in
Aramaic. And certainly not reading the Biblical texts. Certainly
Nehemiah took it as a case where the men were not living Jewish lives.

> They certainly wrote a classical Hebrew with 'classical' verb system. Yes, 
> we
> can distinguish shifts in usage, but did they think that it was not
> classical Hebrew? A diglossic situation seems to have entered the
> language and we can see in Qumran two different registers of
> Hebrew, one rather close to what would become known as Mishnaic
> Hebrew and one that was obviously intended as the continuation of
> "biblical"/literary.
>
Again the difference between a good, classical Latin vs. a “vulgar”
Latin as it developed over the years. Neither was spoken as a mother
tongue for over a thousand years.

> The question is important because this classical Hebrew is attested
> throughout the second Temple, even in a diglossic context (Mishanic vs
> classical/literary). And much "Biblical" Hebrew came into existence
> during this time.
>
Now this is an interesting claim. What do you mean by that? Can you
give examples?

> Looking thru the list I see that some think of the Vayyiqtol system as
> perfective or past, Rolf maybe calling it an imperfective, and George
> called it a 'lively' present (I don't remember the wordings). That's pretty
> much all over the board. So when did they lose control of whatever was
> going on? How did they do it? There was also a discussion of Piel a
> few months ago that struck me as out of line with the way that Semitic
> languages are used. The binyanim seem to be a case of derivational
> morphology, and studying them means that one is studying etymology
> not inflectional morphology. Etymology is good, don't misread me,
> it's just not how a language is normally used.  It  would require classical
> Hebrew, mishnaic Hebrew, Arabic, and Aramaic users, to somehow
> have used roots rather than words when communicating. Be that as it
> may, one wonders if some modern positions do justice to the ancients.
> And again, it brings us back to the question as to when and how did
> conceptions of the language change?  Was there a time when users
> 'misused' the "pure Piel"? (Actually, we can see movement in derivational
> morphology where the NIF`AL ousted both the proto-Hebrew QAL
> passive and the HIFTA`AL [cf. Moabite HILTAHAM  with Judean NILHAM.
> I would expect this to have been mutually intelligible at the time, and
> I doubt that the substitution of forms created a shift in meaning within
> their overall system. Certainly NIGGASH nif`al and YIGGASH qal were
> considered to have the same meaning. I've had a few students
> trained in "binyanim semantics" tell me that that can't be.)
> But when was the system lost, if it was?
> And was there a time when users flipped the vayyiqtol into something
> it wasn't? Anyway, the focus of this thread is time, not the language
> deatils themselves.
>
Again, I see this as a question that is really two questions: 1) when
did people stop using these patterns in their speech and 2) when did
people stop understanding them when reading Tanakh? I do not know the
answer to either, as neither is attested to in Tanakh.

> blessings
> Randall
>
As for the binyanim, I see them as grammaticalizations of concepts
that are not grammaticalized in Indo-European languages, i.e.
causative, passive, etc. As such, as the Piel is usually not
recognizable from the written form, there ought be some other
contextual clues to indicate the presence of the Piel if it exists,
and the meaning I was taught (that it is an intensification of the
Qal) was insufficient to recognize from context. Hence the questions.

Karl W. Randolph.