Biblical Hebrew Forum

[K Randolph <kwrandolph AT gmail.com>]

Randall:

On Thu, Mar 18, 2010 at 4:57 AM, Randall Buth <randallbuth AT gmail.com> wrote:

> > Whether to include all this other data and its relevance to the study
> > of Biblical Hebrew is already a matter of interpretation.
>
> Actually, including the languages is not interpretation, it’s data.
>

Yes, it’s data, that’s not the question. The question is, what’s the
relevance of such data towards the mastery of Biblical Hebrew? When one
studies, what is the purpose of his studies?

To go back to the example I gave in the last message, namely that of
Norwegian, I do not need to know any other Germanic language in order to
master it. On the other hand, if my purpose of studying Norwegian is to see
how it fits within the panoply of Germanic languages, I don’t need to master
the language, but I need to know German, Dutch, Flemish, Danish, Icelandic,
etc.

Data are data, but do the data contribute towards the study at hand? That is
a matter of interpretation.

Arabic has a CVCC noun malki ‘my king’ and udhni ‘my ear’.
> Hebrew has mlky, malki ‘my king’ and ‘zny, ozni ‘my ear’.
>

Those are “modern” pronunciations. What were the original pronunciations?

Just because modern Arabic has CVCC syllables, does that mean that Biblical
Hebrew, which ceased being spoken as a mother tongue ca. 2500 years ago, had
CVCC syllables? Languages change. Languages differ even within families.
What’s true in one language within a family is not necessarily true in all
languages in that language family. Are you projecting modern patterns onto
the ancient language that may not have applied originally to the ancient
language?

>
> That is data that needs to be explained,


Since when? How does it relate to Biblical Hebrew? Can our reliance on such
data distort our understanding of Biblical Hebrew?


> with some questions to be
> answered through the collection of additional, confirming data:
> Are the correspondences regular and widely attested? (Yes)
> Are the correspondences ‘genetic (developing within the respective
> language)’ or ‘borrowings’?
> (answer: genetic—they and many more are part of a core Semitic
> vocabulary attested in ‘West-Central Semitic’ [malk-] and
> pan-Semitic [udhn-/uzn-].
> When did the languages split, (nearest millenium would be more than
> accurate enough)?
> Did Arabic and Hebrew split before attested ‘Biblical Hebrew’? (Yes.)
> How did the vowel patterns develop? What is the correspondence
> between –z- and –dh-? Is –dh- a phoneme from before Bhebrew? Etc.
>

This is all good in a study of comparative linguistics, but what relevance
does it have towards understanding exactly what words meant in Biblical
Hebrew? How does it contribute towards an understanding of Biblical Hebrew
vowel usage where the vowels were not recorded? One of the lessons I
retained from linguistic classes is that vowels are more likely to change,
be dropped, differ between languages, than are consonants, and the question
you are really hung up on concerns those unrecorded vowels.

>
> >For example, does my knowledge of German help me in a study of Norwegian?
> >. . .
> > But there are cases where relying on German would give the
> > wrong answer.
> > That’s the picture we face with Biblical Hebrew. How many wrong answers
> > have we gotten by relying on these other languages? How do we know?
>
> You have missed the point. We are not dealing with semantic etymology
> here, but with structure. Like the Arabic and Hebrew above, it doesn’t
> matter if the meanings have shifted, the genetic correspondences still
> need to be explained. And internal development within each language can
> tell us a lot. One of the nice things about the MT is that it’s
> morphology can be tested against other Semitic languages to see if it is
> genetically Semitic or an artificial reconstruction after the fact or a
> a contamination from another language. We don’t even need 100% certainty
> for this, it is sufficient to show the broad strokes in order to recognize
> the various processes at work. I suggested that you look at the CVCC nouns
> because they are ‘easy’ (like Schroedinger, Bohr, and DeBroglie who worked
> with hydrogen to get a basic picture), or you might like to explain the
> ‘long consonant’ of the so-called pi``el, fa``ala, pa``el. Or the long
> vowel
> of the feminine plural noun suffix or West Semitic Qal participle.
>

If the corruption of the Hebrew language started during the Babylonian Exile
(as I now conclude was the case), how recognizable would it be a millennium
later when a way to record the vowels was invented and applied to the
language? How many other changes to the language occurred during that
interval? Especially if that language were spoken as a second language by
all, and as a primary language by none? As such, wouldn’t the speakers tend
to apply the linguistic patterns of their primary language to Hebrew, in the
same manner as modern German speakers tend to apply German pronunciations to
koiné Greek, pronunciations that are different from what modern English
speakers tend to apply? How much of what you call “genetic” is a result of
early contamination?


>
> >> Languages are like living
> >> organisms, they grow and change, but they are also connected. One must
> >> come up with a theory that reasonably explains the relationships. E.g.,
> >> both vowel and consonant phonemic length are necessary in order to
> >> explain these languages.
>
> > You think I don’t know these facts? Isn’t that one reason I think that
> > Biblical Hebrew originally may have been a CV language?
>
> No, I’m sorry, I don’t think that you know these things, nor that you've
> understood what I had just written. For example, ‘phonemic length in a
> consonant’ patterns with a CVC and CVCC- system. And a prefix like
> hishta-Hawot ‘to bow down’ [root H-w-y, with both –w- and –y- 1Sm15:30
> and frequently] shows an ancient verb pattern inherited from before the
> Arabic-Hebrew split that attests to CVCC hisht- (istaf`aal in Arabic).
>

What were the vowels ca. 800 BC? As far as I know, none of the languages
that used the alphabet recorded them, so how would you know? Where is your
evidence? How close to Biblical Hebrew were those languages that recorded
vowels at that time, i.e. were they mutually understandable, or were
translators needed?

>
> > However, when one studies so many languages as is in
> > a typical Semiticist’s program, he never masters any of the languages.
> > This is a question of mastery.
>
> I detect an ‘ad hominem’ argument here.


No ad hominem argument was explicitly stated, because none was intended. The
emphasis is on the learning style and results.


> And what is to prevent a student
> from throughly mastering one, two, or three of these languages, while
> also developping a working acquaintance with the others? I found reading
> Ugaritic quite enjoyable and easy since I was already a fluent speaker
> of both Hebrew and Arabic. That does not mean, of course, that one reads
> the Ugaritic as either of those languages, simply that the cognate
> vocabulary is relatively easy and the structures even easier. And that
> doesn’t mean that we don’t have many holes in our knowledge of Ugaritic.
> Some things about its structure are known, including its Semitic three-
> vowel morphology. But at the end of day, it is a deciphered language
> without an on-going chain of usage, like Arabic, Hebrew, Aramaic, and
> Ge`ez.
>

Even in the mastery, it will not be the same as if only one language were
studied. The thought patterns from the other languages will still influence
the language that is mastered. That is especially true if the mastered
language is a second language. But it even effects primary languages.

>
>
> > As for me, I think in Hebrew when I read the text.
>
> Psycholinguistic studies show that even Chinese readers have phonological
> brain processes while reading. Assuming that you are not Helen Keller,
> I doubt that someone without a working phonology of Hebrew will truly
> internalize it to the point of thinking in it.
>

LOL! When I read Chinese, I tend to give it Cantonese pronunciations.

Now to be serious. I learned MT pronunciation in class, and I tend to follow
it even now, though not exactly.


> Have you ever talked to yourself for a few hours in fluent BH? One hour?
>

Have you? If so, I would be shocked, because where would you get the
vocabulary to discuss many modern phenomena? If you import them from outside
Biblical Hebrew, is that not already contamination? Once you bring in
contamination, are you still speaking Biblical Hebrew? What other
contamination are you bringing in along with the modern vocabulary? Are you
fooling yourself?

When I read Biblical Hebrew, I don’t translate to another language. Just as
I use contextual clues to anticipate allowable words in English to
compensate for dyslexia, so I use Hebrew contextual clues to anticipate in
Hebrew what I should expect next. If that isn’t thinking in Biblical Hebrew,
what is it?


> If you haven’t, your claim doesn’t mean anything, and even if you have,
> how do we know that it is not self-deception?
> Now I will admit to making mistakes when using a language internalized as
> an adult, even in English. (I can usually correct them myself, but mistakes
> are part of real language communication.)
> Last summer I gave an hour lecture to an intermediate class all in BH
> discussing the relationship of Ps 2 and 110. A visiting professor was
> following along and asked about a particular structure afterwards. I smiled
> approvingly and said, ‘Yes, good ears. That was a post-Biblicism. I felt a
> twinge when I said it, but like all communication, the point is not to stop
> and correct or explain anything rare or a mistake.’ He agreed, and was
> quite pleased with the class.
> As a joke we tell students that they will need to make 30,000 mistakes in
> order to learn a language well and they need to let teachers make 10000
> mistakes. (Maybe it’s closer to 100,000 mistakes for learning a language,
> but why discourage someone?)
>

If you really want to discourage them, tell them that they need to put in
about 10,000 hours in order to master their subject. If they put in about an
hour a day, that would take about 30 years to master Hebrew.

>
> >> Maybe another relevant question would be to ask the opposite:
> >> how many times has someone mis-read the text? If someone were reading
> >> the consonantal text with only CVCVCV patterns,
>
> > Boy are you hung up on pronunciation!
>
> It’s just a measurable point of testing your English Hebrew claims.
>

“English Hebrew” What’s that?

>
>
> braxot
> Randall Buth
>
> --
> Randall Buth, PhD
> www.biblicalulpan.org
> randallbuth AT gmail.com
> Biblical Language Center
> Learn Easily - Progress Further - Remember for Life
>
> Boy, in trying to respond to all the points in this message, the response
turned out too long. Therefore I have to break it up, or not respond. For
this once, I decided to break it up.

Karl W. Randolph.