Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Gabe Eisenstein <gabe AT cascadeaccess.com>]

Two cents' worth from a philosopher:

"Uncancellable meaning" is another name for the old philosophical idea 
of conceptual unity. Plato said conceptual unities exist in nature. 
Aristotle said they correspond to the essences of things, and to 
definitions. Kant said they derive from the logically necessary 
structure of perception and reason. But experience showed that natural 
language ("natural" as opposed to the artificial constructions of 
logicians) continually violates the supposed conceptual unity designated 
by a word. Wittgenstein greatly clarified the point for 20th century 
philosophers with his example of "family resemblance", where all the 
members of a family share properties with some other members, but there 
is no property shared by all members. (He also used the example of 
games, which can't be defined by any essential property such as winning 
and losing; and on this basis went on to talk about "language games" as 
the primary linguistic realities, rather than unified entities called 
"languages", each with a single system of meanings and concepts.) The 
same phenomenon has also been described as the "dissemination" of 
meaning, through changes not held in check by any conceptual unity.

I believe that these considerations are applicable in general, and that 
it would be pointless to ask whether some particular language such as 
Biblical Hebrew does or does not express the unity of concepts. The fact 
that you can come up with definitions or conceptual properties that you 
think are necessary for the "proper" or "standard" usage of this or that 
word proves nothing. Meanings and usages change, and whatever boundaries 
you draw will be erased.
The changeability of language also tells against the alleged 
lexical-grammatical-stylistic unity of a language called Biblical Hebrew 
spoken from 1400 to 400 BC. Belief in such an incomparable phenomenon is 
a religious belief.


Gabe Eisenstein