Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Randall Buth <randallbuth AT gmail.com>]

vayyixtov Uri
>  Karl,
>  Let us imagine an expert in Chuacer who does not know English.
>  How much modern English would such an imaginary scholar
>   understand?
>
>   Everyone can develop his own defintion of 'Dead Language'.
>   A simple derfintion would be 'a lnanguage  which is not in use'
> . . .
>    Uri Hurwitz

>> Hebrew has changed more than Latin in its history. However, I agree with 
>> you
>> that it has been continuously used since ancient times. But at the same 
>> time
>> it has changed so much that I cannot understand modern Israeli Hebrew even
>> while I prefer to read Tanakh without points.

because of trying to understand previous comments about niqqud,
I am curious as to what kind of reading you do. This is an honest question.
Do you read with vowel sounds? where did you get them? and Begedkefet?
any doubled consonants? why, why not?
Would you recommend the same for Arabic texts, e.g., the
mu`allaqaat, or Aramaic, or ... Akkadian?

>> Hebrew has changed more than Latin in its history.

On language change, I suppose it also depends on what is included.
There was a time when "Latin" was spoken in various realms in different
ways and was becoming mutually unintelligible with other dialects.
Does one include Rashi's proto-French as Latin?
These were also at one time part of what is called a 'diglossia', like Arabic
today, where people write one 'high register' while speaking a lower register.
People would write "Latin" and would speak a local development of that
Latin.

When viewed in this manner, Hebrew has changed much less than Latin.
classical Hebrew to mishnaic Hebrew is nothing compared to classical
Latin and the Chanson du Roland.
In fact, we even have the diglossic situation at the end of the Second Temple
when people were writing a 'high dialect' and speaking a 'low dialect'
development of that language. Fortunately for us, they started to write down
that dialect (in a similar way that Dante and crew started to write down the
'low spoken dialect') and we have a massive mishnaic Hebrew corpus,
though including some earlier pieces of a sister low dialect at Qumran
(Copper scroll, 4QMMT) and even Qohelet in the Hebrew canon.

An additional item in the history of Hebrew is that the virtual loss of 
mother-
tongue speakers of mishnaic Hebrew (2-6c CE) led to an interesting
development. Medieval Hebrew essentially split the difference between
high Hebrew (classical/biblical) and low Hebrew (mishnaic) and created a
'middle high' dialect with mishnaic syntax mixed with biblicizing morphology.
This has resulted today in the phenomenon that modern Hebrew morphology
transfers 99+% to the biblical language. (Practically speaking it's 100%, but
one must allow for authors to creatively use mishnaic forms like matsinu
'we found' or 'lemedim' 'we learn, deduce, know'.

So in some senses medieval and modern Hebrew are closer to classical
Hebrew than mishaic was. So I guess that I strongly diasagree with the
thesis that Hebrew changed more than Latin. And little children today
in Israel can read the stories of Avraham and Shmuel in the original much
easier than a French or Italian child can read Caesar's wars in Latin. The
latter can't be done at all, even with a few tutoring sessions, but the 
Israeli
children only need an explanation about how 'they talk funny in the Bible'.

And as to dead language, does one say that Greek was 'dead' in the time of
Luke and Plutarch because they were speaking a dialect quite developed
from Plato, not to mention OMHROS?
Don't Greek scholars benefit from dealing with both/all?

There are two poles of the 'dead' question that should be remembered when
discussing.
1. Any older period of a language may be called 'dead' in the sense that
there are no longer any mother-tongue speakers of the dialect. E.g.
Both Chaucerian and the much developed Shakespearian Englishes
are 'dead', in this sense. For that matter, Civil War and Wild West English
are 'dead'. In fact, at a micro level, my own personal idiolect from twenty
years ago is dead. Maybe even yesterday's, I haven't had my coffee yet !
Language is negotiated communication with codes continually in flux.

2. On the other hand, wherever there has been a continuous use and
knowledge of a language it is in a much different category from a dead
and deciphered language. Hittite, Egyptian, Akkadian and Ugaritic are dead
and deciphered languages. (The Copts may object to this grouping.)

Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek, Arabic, Latin and Sanskrit all have a continuous
history of knowledge and use that separates them from Hi.Eg.Ak.Ug, just
mentioned. We can add shakespearian English to that categogy. And
we can add classical Hebrew to the shakespeare/modern English
category when we consider the Second Temple diglossic period.

Personally I think that it is a mistake in the field of Semitic studies
that we have the equivalent of "Chaucer scholars" who can't read
Shakespeare. The field of Hebrew would be better understood and discussed
today if "Chaucer scholars" could discuss Shakespeare in some English
dialect. This applies to Arabic studies as well as to Hebrew. I would require
Arabic lit majors to speak at least one Arabic dialect. yareet.
Both continuity and change in a language has much to teach one at any level
because one is aware of the need for a logical linguistic explanation for the
changes that occur. For example, much of the discussion last week on
begedkefet would have taken a different track. (Tho some things wouldn't have
been helped except by clearer definitions. An "aspirated b' is something to
be discussed in Sanskrit not Hebrew. And a western European would
probably have trouble making such an unwarranted reconstructed allophone
sound natural [I refer only to major languages Sp, Fr, Eng, Ger., I am not
aware of the situation in Gypsy/Romani.)

May such days of multidialect fluency come to our field.

Randall Buth


-- 
Randall Buth, PhD
www.biblicalulpan.org
randallbuth AT gmail.com
Biblical Language Center
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