Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Yitzhak Sapir <yitzhaksapir AT gmail.com>]

Hello James,

As someone who just the other day said I dated Ruth late (I don't), you
shouldn't be speaking about how I misrepresent your position.  Bryant
actually  bought that characterization of me, and I had to correct him.
The discussion did start with your suggestion about Samaritan and Jewish
traditions of the Pentateuch which came up in the not so appropriately
named Genesis 30 thread.  After that thread was closed, Karl brought
it up again in the discussion of orthography, since my linguistic claim
regarding Ruth did have to do with orthography (but not with the issue
at hand).  If you don't believe me -- look it up in the archives!

I spent a long time dealing with your questions and bringing relevant 
evidence.
I hoped you would address the relevant evidence I brought from epigraphic
sources and the Bible and the questions I raised on that basis but all we
get is more winding long talk about hairsplitting, more irrelevant data and no
willingness to confront the evidence.  The list members -- I'm sure
they're tired
of it, and they all realize that you brought no relevant evidence and refused 
to
answer simple questions, again and again, even now.

You also wrote:

> Now a lot of the rest of what you said just sounded like the typical
> spouting of a theoretical linguist. To any serious computational linguist
> the remedy to your misguided impressions is quite simple. ...
>
> 1) Take a 1,000 word sample of English ...

James, the claims regarding the 1000 word sample being sufficient
for corpus analysis was -- get this -- published in a journal of linguistic
computing!  This means it was approved by a group of computational
linguists (peer review)!  It used statistical analysis of actual data to
come to its conclusions.  So much for those theoretical linguists with
no data.

Here is the abstract:
http://llc.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/5/4/257

This will be my last message to you on this thread.

Yitzhak Sapir