Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Doug Belot" <dbelot AT bigpond.net.au>]

Hi Karl , With such reading behind you ,  you would have a better 
understanding than most , could you give me your understanding of Is 62:1-7 
, and would you tell me the correct way to read Is 62:5 .

And when you think this prophecy is to be .

doug Belot

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "K Randolph" <kwrandolph AT gmail.com>
To: "Hebrew" <b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org>
Sent: Tuesday, February 09, 2010 1:32 AM
Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] Tools For Learning Ancient Hebrew


> 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.
> _______________________________________________
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> b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org
> http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/b-hebrew


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