Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Richard" <aaa AT endlyss.com>]

I find that learning modern Hebrew helps a lot with getting a general feel
for the verb forms and many of the little things like prepositions and such.
But I am glad I avoided modern Hebrew initially until I had a basic feel for
Biblical Hebrew and could see differences. I still have a long way to go but
am loving the journey. This list is helping a lot as well BTW.

Richard Conaway



> -----Original Message-----
> From: b-hebrew-bounces AT lists.ibiblio.org [mailto:b-hebrew-
> bounces AT lists.ibiblio.org] On Behalf Of Randall Buth
> Sent: Sunday, February 07, 2010 6:20 AM
> To: Hebrew
> Subject: [b-hebrew] Tools For Learning Ancient Hebrew
> 
> >> 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
> Learn Easily - Progress Further - Remember for Life
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