Biblical Hebrew Forum

[K Randolph <kwrandolph AT gmail.com>]

On Sun, Feb 7, 2010 at 6:20 AM, Randall Buth <randallbuth AT gmail.com> wrote:

> >
> >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.
> >
> >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.
>

I can’t read Shakespeare, nor the KJV. If I read them superficially,
ignoring all that I don’t understand, I can get the general picture. But if
I try to read them in depth, to understand them thoroughly, I get bogged
down in statements that make no sense according to modern English. It’s not
the words that have dropped out of use that are the problem, rather those
that have changed meaning, and I have been told that there are hundreds of
them, where I know neither their archaic meanings nor that they have changed
meanings. For me, personally, going directly to the Hebrew was easier.


> 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.
>

All well and good, and I agree with this entirely. Except for one little
problem—in order to do this, we need to have a body of literature that far
exceeds the NIV in vocabulary and sheer size, and we don’t have it for
Biblical Hebrew.

>
> 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'.
>

Equally bizarre is to take a dialectal pronunciation from non-native
speakers and claiming that that’s how native speakers from centuries earlier
pronounced the language. Or to give an illustration, that’s equivalent to
saying that the pronunciation preserved in the Katzenjammer Kids cartoons
preserves the pronunciation of Shakespeare.

There is a difference between an effort “to delete a layer of the language,
say the vowels” and the recognition that the layer of the language was not
preserved in the first place. In the latter case, any attempt to reconstruct
that missing layer of the language can be tentative at best, and most likely
at least partially wrong. That includes the Masoretic reconstruction.

>
> 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.
>

The above paragraph illustrates what I consider a major problem in Biblical
Hebrew studies: namely the approach to Hebrew studies. While the method I
learned in class was “thru analysis and root processing”, which I believe
fits 99% of classroom studies, when I started reading, my aim was merely
fluency in as close a manner to a native speaker as reading a non-spoken
language can be. So while Randall was studying all those grammars, I was
merely reading Tanakh and building up my fluency. Yet, even then, I already
noticed that some of the analysis that I had been taught didn’t fit what I
was reading, and some of the root processing didn’t make sense.

I have given some thought on how I would teach Biblical Hebrew, were I to be
a professor. While I would make use of some of the concepts known to people
learning Hebrew as a second language, such as teaching a certain amount of
grammar, my main goal would be reading fluency; “thru analysis and root
processing” only to be later, much later if ever. And I would admit to
students that there are gaps in our knowledge of Biblical Hebrew.

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

Karl W. Randolph.