Biblical Hebrew Forum

[James Christian <jc.bhebrew AT googlemail.com>]

Hi,

recent discussions have inspired me to make a few observations that may be
of interest. Just recently at a seminar I had quite a lengthy and
interesting discussion with a world famous morphologist. I won't mention his
name (partly because I don't remember it and partly because I'm not sure if
he would want me to). Our discussion centered basically around the
definition of 'word'. I find discussion about words difficult to ground
because in terms of speech signals there are no word boundaries
asweseethemonthepage (as we see them on the page). We discussed several
different definitions of words. There are the words you see on a page, there
are the words you see in a lexicon, there is a constituent notion of a word
and there is the pyscholinguist cognition of a word. This becomes
interesting when we discuss words like bookshelf, cat food and so on. Are
they one word? Or two? What about words including clitics? e.g. it's, I'm,
he's got. Are they one word or two? How can we define a word? What was it
about our perception that inspired us to start putting spaces on the page
where there are no spaces in the speech signal?

This is obviously of some relevance to forms like wayyiqtols. At some point
in time ancient Semitic writing stopped being continuous sequences and
spaces began to be used at the confines of words. Or at least of what were
perceived to be words. And so the question arises. What did they perceive as
'words'? Why did they write wayiqtol and not wa yiqtol? What factors led
their decision making process? The fact that wa, in general, doesn't appear
as a separate word would seem to indicate that, in general, it was not
perceived as a different word by whatever concensus led to the division of
words. Probably best to thing of wa as a morph. Does that morph change the
meaning of sequences of morphs that follow? i.e. Does the yomer of yomer
have a different meaning from the yomer of wayomer?

James Christian