Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Randall Buth <randallbuth AT gmail.com>]

>> But let's take the analogy.  Do you know someone who recommends
>> learning Beowulf without
>> knowing Modern English first?
>>
>> Yitzhak Sapir
>
> If the only reason a person learned English is to read Beowulf, then
learning modern English would be of no help, except to access scholarly
studies written in modern English concerning Beowulf.
>
>The only reason I learned Hebrew is to read Tanakh, which I have read over
twenty times cover to cover. I have yet to learn any modern Hebrew beyond a
few basic facts.
>
>There are many people like me who learned Biblical Hebrew for the sole
purpose of reading Tanakh, but how many learn English for the sole purpose
of reading Beowulf?
>
>Karl W. Randolph.


The discussion is tending toward 'strawmen'. Even closer in comparison to
Hebrew would be Shakespeare and occasionally Chaucer, which strengthens
Yizhaq's analogy.
There is also something that can be called 'collocational meaning' and
high level reading.
If a person learned "NIV-English" to read the NIV-English Bible, but
never read any other English, and never spoke a word of English or heard a
word of English in meaningful communication, they would be missing be
something in their "NIV" reading. They would not easily feel
the collocational position of vocab choices, nor would they feel avoidance of
some words because of poor sound appropriateness or differentiation,
nor would they easily perceive what other structural choices
were available to the author/translator that were not chosen and against which
people subconsciously process any communication in any language.
The brain would not automatically flip the words into other forms
as they were viewed in different perspectives and with various questions.
This is what people expect when reading a literarature.

And things get even more bizarre if a reader of a literature decided
to delete a
layer of the language, say the vowels, and recreate a new language 'in their
head'.

And as predicted, this thread appears to pretty much divide along the lines of
those who speak modern Hebrew and those who don't. And talking about
the situation in another language, like English, doesn't do justice to the
gulf that exists in the fluencies of the two approaches. Which is why 99%
of those fluent in modern, whether learned before or after 'knowing/learning'
biblical Hebrew, strongly recommend learning modern. I read over half the
Hebrew B and grammars as diverse as Weingreen, Driver (Tenses), Gesenius,
Sperber, Blake, Lambdin, and a couple of other forgetables, not to
mention other Semitic languages, before starting and learning to speak modern.
That was over 35 years ago. Looking back, I would recommend the reverse
process. Speaking Hebrew changed the way that the language was being
processed and allowed seeing relationships that were not brought out thru
analysis and root processing. If at all possible, one should learn
to speak a language that one wants to read a lot, and then
read to one's heart's content. Technically, I did Arabic 'backwards', too, but
at least I got a spoken dialect earlier.

braxot
Randall



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