Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Randall Buth <randallbuth AT gmail.com>]

Christian katav
> Surely,
> you accept that your knowledge of Modern Hebrew as a spoken language could
> be an influencing factor on your 'internalisation' of b-hebrew.

This misses the points of the thread. But it is also true that modern
Hebrew helps one in BH internalization because the morphology is
quickly a non-issue. Certainly beats Italian. But the thread was about
mistaken ideas of 'conjugating roots' on the fly, sentence after
sentence. That is not how Semitic languages work.

> One statement you made that struck me as highly dubious was when you claimed
> that you and a group of teachers were going to talk about the best way to
> teach a grammatical phenomenon

yes, approximately. We discussed how to best teach BH.

> and this discussion would be conducted in
> b-hebrew.

Yes, the discussion times and demos and practice were about 75-80% of
time in BH. About 20-25% of time was spent in English for various
purposes, including the clarification of where communication was not
being understood in BH, and more often when referring to discussions
in Secondary Language Acquisition studies, of which none exist in
BH and prominent ones have been published in English.

> Surely, the necessary vocabulary for such a discussion is not even
> testified in the b-hebrew corpus?

Correct. Even the name 'Bible' is post-biblical, as are all
metalinguistic terms. It was
agreed that the traditional Hebrew terms would be used in Hebrew in
order to name
what was being described. So nouns were referred to as 'shem', verbs
as 'po`al', a
root as 'shoresh', and a binyan as 'binyan', smixut as 'smixut', etc.
For many, the
Hebrew names/terms were new, but their definitions did not play a
significant part of
any of the discussions.

It was an excellent week together, and quite eye-opening in many directions.
We plan half-hour reports, with video, at ETS and at SBL.

blessings
Randall



-- 
Randall Buth, PhD
www.biblicalulpan.org
randallbuth AT gmail.com
Biblical Language Center
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