Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Randall Buth <randallbuth AT gmail.com>]

[[>> is RB]]
[[> is KR]]
...
>> Roots are explanations about where a word came from.
>> This is true in every language.
>> In fact, what more does one want from etymology?
...

> My understanding is ... that you do not question the main
> themes of the experts who taught you. ...

Your understanding is in obvious error. And bringing up personal
perceptions of others is irrelevant to the data.
You may need to pay closer attention to what I say.
You might like the blog I mentioned last week.
http://alefandomega.blogspot.com/2010/08/on-history-of-hebrew-yiqtol-and-hebrew.html
pointing out that yiqtol in a future context does NOT mark
aspect. That is a view that I've held for about 36 years,
and is/was definitely not the way most in the field talk.

>Further, the main purpose that you
> studied Hebrew was for translation into other languages.
>  I, on the other hand, ...

Again, you speculate incorrectly, getting the cart before the
horse. I worked in Bible translation because I had the
background to contribute something to national translators
who did not have a Hebrew or Greek background.

And these personal discussions are truly irrelevant, maybe a
smokescreen.
If I met someone who read a first-year Arabic grammar and
then studied an unvocalized Quran with an analytical lexicon
umpteen number of times, I would not be sure that they "knew"
Arabic. Hopefully that doesn't apply to you. Can we be
done with personal allegations? There is real data below.

>> The data on le-haxin להכין showed non-predictable collocations
>> with 'food' in Biblical Hebrew.
>
> I think studies in languages should not be predictive, rather descriptive.

Strange dichotomy. Maybe you misunderstand 'predict'.
Predictions are usually considered good ways of testing theories.

Maybe we can both agree that 'prescription', something totally
different from 'prediction', are wrong methodology. That is, explaining
how something 'has to be' as prescriptive grammar is wrong.
To be honest, your approach to the binyanim looks like 'prescription',
the applying of your grammar to what Hebrew words 'really mean,
need to mean'. You will need to show that your system is a best fit
and best 'predicts' the output that is attested in the Hebrew Bible.
We both already work in the other direction, that is etymology.

e.g., by etymology someone might think that a qedesha might be
any holy thing [it is a 'cult prostitute']. I would claim that the root
does not predict the specific meaning that the word ended up with,
instead we can take the noun and see where it came from,
but that is a noun and gets us offtrack. (I read your response
and 'nagid' before writing this response.)

> Looking at the meaning of the word, “to establish, in the sense of setting
> up, making firm, trustworthy”, do the following fit the meaning of the
> word?
>> (cf. Gn 43.16,
> Yep, without going into the details of how the meal was established, set
> up.

And why didn't you do a pure application of your hif`il theory:
'to CAUSE the food to ESTABLISH . . .'?
And if you take the 'causative' out of the meaning of your root
you still get 'made the meal trustworthy, firm, established'.
Do you mean 'arrange the table, invite to dinner'?
I meant 'prepare the food, implying arrange the meal'.

As mentioned, your starting point was off,
since the root would not be 'establish' but more like
'be stable, positioned unwavering, be firm'. Then remember that
you must hif`ilize the root starting point before getting  'establish'.
So that your system predicts a hif`il 'stabilize, make firm.'
When you are done with that and recognize that both le-konen and
le-hakin can refer to 'founding/establishing kingdoms', you will want
to take note that le-konen is never used with preparing food. That
should go into the equation, too.


> Just as any student of languages recognizes that English “under” and German
> “unter” come from the same root, yet the German word is used in contexts
> that cannot be predicted by English usage,

exactly.
same root + time and usage = different meanings.

>> Hopefully. You might come around, too. I mean that
>> in as inviting a way as it can be. It especially happens
>> when people start using the language in two directions and
>> noticing that they must restrict their 'predictions' in order to
>> move in the direction of attested usage at any period.

You still haven't recognized that the extrapolations from your
'roots' and applied grammar (pi``el, hi`fil) would 'over-predict'
and the extrapolations are restricted into specific meanings by
the language community and attested text.

>> But how do you know and show that this "inflectional view" is not the
>> influence of 'first year pedagogy' (first year lies, as you
>> sometimes say) and heavy reliance on an analytical lexicon in a
>> foreign language?
>>
>> There is a simple way to test.
>> See what your predictions produce, and then
>> compare the predictions to attested occurrences.
>
> I try not to predict, rather just explain. Predictions can lock one into
> patterns that turn out to be wrong. Explanations can be constantly updated
> as new data is entered.

You haven't understood this yet. You are predicting every time you
use your pi``el and hif`il "inflexional grammar". And you haven't been
noticing all of the natural predictions that the language has chosen
not to use as words, like with higgid below. It is the 'inflexional grammar'
that is already locking you into wrong patterns.
Smell the coffee, look in mirror. Get free of those 'locked patterns'.

> If we write in BH, we could not carry on this discussion. BH does not have
> technical grammatical terms, like verb, noun, inflection, tense, aspect,
> mood, and so forth. Did it have those terms, but they were not recorded in
> the Bible? We don’t know.

לא יכלת לכתב על זה ?
 אם תחפץ אתן לך מלים כמו שֵם ופֹעַל. אם לא, אל תדבר על 'שם' או 'פעל'.
דבר על דברים מסביבותיהן.
כי פה יוכלו כל מורינו לבאר את הכתובים בשפת כנען. ואנחנו מוסיפים מלים
מועילות כמו 'עברית' 'מקרא' 'תנ"ך' 'שם' 'פעל' 'הפעיל' ואחרות. וגם אינם פחדים
מעשות שגיות כי כלם יודעים כי ככה מצליחים בשפה.

[KR]
>>> To give an example, NGD has the meaning of: “to be(come)
>>> before, in front of ⇒ hi. to cause to be in front of, most often
>>> used in giving a message, making sure the it is received,

[RB]
>> This proposal on higgid is a triple etymological mistake.
>
> Is this predictive, or descriptive?

Descriptive, simply describing what you've said, and what
you have not said. And comparing the text.

[RB]
>> First, it does not explain why higgid yaggid is limited to
>> speaking and not physical movement, weapons, etc.,
>> despite the very physical 'neged' "in front of", and despite
>> your implication in saying "most often", as if
>> non-communication examples were known. All 369
>> examples are restricted to communication. Amazing.
>> Fantastic.
>
> I just looked through a couple hundred, and there are a few that are
> questionable, enough so that an argument can be made that they refer to
> other than communication. But those are judgment calls which different
> people can read differently.

So argue it. Even if you were to show five examples that
'surely mean the causative action of the physical root', it would not
explain the 99 to 1 restriction in usage. And if you can only show
that a person could force the meaning of a sentence into a
physical, non-communication meaning, your explanation lacks
the theoretical power to explain how and why the locals were
using the verb as they did.


> But then the noun NGYD refers to a person.

More proof against your 'theory'. Why restricted to a
person? AND
It is not just a person standing in front of something,
but specifically 'a leader, ruler', more restrictive than its root.

And that still is not higgid, is it?

>>
>> Secondly, it implies an agressiveness or negativity
>> borrowed from English, though I am sure that this
>> was inadvertant on your part and only by way of example.
>
> My understanding of the American English “in your face” is neutral, can be
> either negative, or positive depending on the context. But I see this as
> more than just a report, rather it is a “laying on the table” making sure
> that the recipient got the message.

Fine. I didn't hold 'in your face' against you. Nor do I care about
the English.

>> Thirdly, as a very common verb occurring 369 times,
>> it does not explain the unexpected lack of nagad (qal)
>> or naged (qal pa`el) or nigged (pi``el), et al.
>
> Let’s look at another very common verb, X+), which has the basic meaning of
> “to err, miss the target”. Yet, only once is this clearly the meaning in
> Tanakh. Almost every other case it refers to a moral missing the mark,
> usually translated as “sin”. But on the street, which would have been the
> more common use?

Actually, it is the hif`il le-haHTi' that means 'to miss the target', though
some qal may mean 'miss out, lack'.

and le-HaTTe' can mean to 'get rid of sin, purify, fulfill the lack'.
 הדבר מוכח עליך עוד

These last meanings exist because the language community chose
to use them. They were not automatic conjugations from HaTa'
'to err, fail'. And synonyms for 'to err, be guilty' cannot be pi``elized
into meaning 'to purify'. Neither a non-existant *ti``a תִעה,
nor *Ti``a טִעה, nor *shiggeg שגג, nor *shigga ,שגה nor *ishem
אשם mean purify, nor would they be expected to be, nor did they
mean such in the HB or in the whole history of language that you
haven't read.

So your theory does not automatically conjugate HiTTa'
nor does it explain the lack of *nagad, *niggad, *nigged.
(Some of these are attested later in the language, like
nigged 'to oppose, to force into a shape', but while that fits the
etymology it cannot be 'conjugated' from the root, and has a
negative connotation that is missing from higgid.)

> So similarly for NGD, the limited literature that is Tanakh cannot rule out
> other uses of either a qal, niphal or other binyan, nor even other uses of
> the hiphil.

So you choose zero out of 369 in order to justify your 'first year
grammar'? Why not say le-haggid means 'to communicate',
and be done with it? If you say that it "really" means 'to put a
thing in front of something', this what is called the etymological
fallacy, and is something done by people in all languages, and
not infrequently by 'radio preachers' trying to impress an
audience.

>> Examples like this, multiplied as many times as needed,
>> in as many Semitic languages and dialects as needed,
>> are why a person must treat non-passive Nif`al, Pi``el,
>> Hitpa``el and Hif`il as words, (within what is called
>> derivational morphology in linguistics
>> [different word development], as opposed to
>> inflectional morphology [same word marked with a
>> syntactic/grammatical tag]).
>
> Here you refer to cognate languages. Let’s stick to Biblical Hebrew.

"multiplied as many times as needed" refers to Biblical Hebrew.
And means just that, as many times as necessary, as you saw
when you raised new words. Biblical Hebrew was a human
language like other languages and your system needs to allow
a language to grow and change.
I only added the other Semitic languages to help you and to
let you know that they, too, work this way. Biblical Hebrew,
later Hebrew, Arabic, Aramaic, etc. They all have systems
of derivational morphology that show nice etymology but
that contradict your 'first year grammar'. 'Conjugating roots'
is not how BH works/worked synchronically.

blessings
Randall


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