Biblical Hebrew Forum

[K Randolph <kwrandolph AT gmail.com>]

Randall:
I think your questions are aimed at me, not Uri.

On Wed, Aug 26, 2009 at 3:11 AM, Randall Buth <randallbuth AT gmail.com> wrote:

> 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?


Yes.


> where did you get them?


Loosely, from what I learned in class so many years ago. I also used to read
Tanakh with points, and at that time followed the points closely, so they
were well ingrained in my mind.


> and Begedkefet?


No. They are not phonemic. They are unnecessary for the understanding of the
text. I have come to the conclusion that they were not in pre-Babylonian
Exile Hebrew.


>
> any doubled consonants? why, why not?


Other than those specifically written out, nope. I have come to the
conclusion that many of those are grammarian artifacts trying to fit the
language into a pattern that it originally didn’t have. A good example is
the triliteral roots for all verbs: I think the evidence points to that many
were actually biliteral, and a few quadraliteral.


>
> Would you recommend the same for Arabic texts, e.g., the
> mu`allaqaat, or Aramaic, or ... Akkadian?
>
> I don’t know these languages, either at all or not well enough, to say
whether or not they follow the same patterns as Biblical Hebrew. Therefore
‘no comment’.


> >> Hebrew has changed more than Latin in its history.
>
> On language change, I suppose it also depends on what is included.


Very much so, and I suspect that it often has more to do with politics and
practice than linguistics.

For example, when that French speaking Viking invaded England, it set off
centuries of massive linguistic turmoil until we came up with the creole
that we speak today. Yet it is still said to be the same language albeit
changed.

On the other hand, by the *Chanson du Roland* almost universally it is
recognized that here we are dealing with French, not Latin, even though far
less change happened. Part of that is recognized that we are dealing with
people living in France. Part of it from the practice that lesser changed
Latin was still in use—read, spoken and written—and for centuries
afterwards, therefore the local speech was designated by a different name to
differentiate it from Latin.


>
> 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.


But the majority of linguists, I included, don’t view it in that manner.

On an aside, I didn’t know that Rashi wrote any proto-French, as the area he
lived in, Elsaß, spoke German and the influence of that dialect on Yiddish
is recognizable to this day.


>
> 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)


I don’t think there were any mother-tongue speakers of Mishnaic Hebrew,
ever. But the paucity of evidence either way does not allow us to be
certain. Therefore, let’s not argue the point. (Emotionally, I’d like to
agree with you, but scholastic honesty does not allow me to.)


> 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.
>

To me this sounds like a reform movement in church Latin during the
Renaissance, with the same results. In the case of Latin, there were no
mother-tongue speakers of Latin, neither for centuries previously nor
afterwards.


> 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'.
>
> No, the morphology, at least as written in Israeli newspapers, is
different, which is part of the reason I find it so very difficult to
understand. If you can’t tell the difference, then you are an example of
what I mention below.


> 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.
>
> When I was young, I was inclined to agree with you. But now, I see a place
for someone who is monolingual in Biblical Hebrew only.

The first time I read the Bible through, it was the KJV. Oh, I understood
most of it, probably close to 98%. But when I started reading it through a
second time, this time I wanted to be very careful and understand
everything, I ran across verse after verse where I would scratch my head and
say, “This doesn’t make sense” or “This is unclear” and so started looking
up in Hebrew and Greek to decipher what the Elizabethan English said. In
order to understand the Elizabethan English, I needed to filter out modern
English changes. But I didn’t, and still don’t, know Elizabethan English
well enough to filter out modern English understandings, with the result
that I often don’t understand the KJV. I give this as an example for the
following.

My grandfather then came and scolded me, that I should be reading the Hebrew
and Greek directly. I followed his advice. Then I entered a sort of
linguistic hermitage. not by choice but by circumstances, where I read
Tanakh many times with only a few tools to help me, where I learned to think
in Biblical Hebrew. But I never intended to become a Biblical Hebrew
scholar, as I was told that door was closed to me.

Since coming out of that “linguistic hermitage”, I have found that most
students of Biblical Hebrew, that includes most scholars, have also studied
Mishnaic Hebrew, modern Hebrew, Arabic, Ugaritic, Aramaic and so forth. But
they don’t know Biblical Hebrew qua Biblical Hebrew well enough to filter
out the influences on their thinking brought about by studying all those
cognate languages when they read and try to think in Biblical Hebrew. Even I
am not totally free from those influences, based on the classroom lessons
learned as an undergraduate as well as following those teachings for years
afterwards.

There is a place for both the scholar who has studied many cognate
languages, and for the scholar who is monolingual in Biblical Hebrew. There
are advantages and disadvantages to both. I see the disadvantages for me
being monolingual vis-à-vis Biblical Hebrew. There are times where I have
questions where knowledge of cognate languages would really help.


> Randall Buth
>
>
> --
> Randall Buth, PhD
> www.biblicalulpan.org
> randallbuth AT gmail.com
> Biblical Language Center
> Learn Easily - Progress Further - Remember for Life


For years now, I have been reading Tanakh using a font derived from the
Gezar Calendar. There were and are no points connected with that font, not
even a differentiation between the sin and shin. I’ll admit that the use of
this practice has influenced how I read and understand the language.

Karl W. Randolph.