Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Randall Buth <randallbuth AT gmail.com>]

> In other words, if I read this correctly, most Biblical Hebrew professors
> still believe that the qatal and yiqtol inflections signify time based
> concepts, such as tense and/or aspect?

yes, most still think in terms of aspect only. They assume that time is
only a European approximation for talking about verbs that are aspects.
It's how most were taught. And in past contexts I, too, think that yiqtol
refers to aspect, just that yiqtol does not refer to aspect in future 
contexts.
(If wanting to question or comment on this please open a different thread.)

>> Strange dichotomy. Maybe you misunderstand 'predict'.
>> Predictions are usually considered good ways of testing theories.
>
> Not necessary in descriptions. Or are you trying to go beyond description?

DESCRIPTIONS of a hif`il are an attempt to discuss/describe how a qal
'maps/projects/produces/predicts/relates...' to a hif`il. That can be 'tested'
for conformity/consistency. Such examination is how to break free
of etymological thinking. Nothing is leaving attested BH, it is describing
the relationship and situation. This comment shouldn't be necessary,
but arises from disputing labels of another's view. There is no issue
here between us, just my use of abstract terminology that is used in
evaluating hypotheses.

>> 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,
...
> This is an example of etymology, not inflection.

Good. But why do you say that?
Older dictionaries used to group verbs and nouns together
under a root. Are you saying that non-predictable, restricted
meanings for forms related to a root are evidence of 'etymology',
that is, they are counter-evidence against an inflectional hypothesis,
and evidence of the development of meaning through usage
and choice by the community? Then we are agreed !  I am
relieved that you don't assume that there are "non-prostitute"
qedeshot in BH because of the 'holy' etymology. And you grant
that with only five attestations! Thank you very much.

>> >> (cf. Gn 43.16,
>> And why didn't you do a pure application of your hif`il theory:
>> 'to CAUSE the food to ESTABLISH . . .'?
>
> Is that a hiphil, or a hophal? Doesn’t the lack of the medial yod mean
> anything?

The lack of yod is the expected form of a Hif`il imperative without
a suffix. This should be second nature, not even needing thought
or discussion. 2. The context is imperatival. So the natural reading
is 'butcher an animal and prepare a meal'. 'Butcher an animal
and it will be prepared' is a more problematic reading. Who will
prepared it? Therefore I read hif`il imperative הכן haken, which
exactly fits the consonantal text.

>> …
>> As mentioned, your starting point was off,
>> since the root would not be 'establish' but more like
>> 'be stable, positioned unwavering, be firm'.
>
> Where do you get that definition? That’s not the definition I find when
> making a descriptive definition based on looking up all its uses in Tanakh,
> using a concordance.

Karl, your 'definition' for your root has to be different from your hif`il so
that you can 'cause' it in such a way as to end up with your hif`il 
inflection.
Your root meaning and your hif`il meaning cannot be the same.
This was already explicitly pointed out:
"Then remember that you must hif`ilize the root starting point
before getting  'establish'."

>>>> But how do you know and show that this "inflectional view" is not
>>>> the influence of 'first year pedagogy'

This question remains unanswered. And every verb in the
tana"x that has a hif`il whose meaning is not simply 'to cause the
QAL' is counter-testimony. You have even said that this is not how
causatives apparently work in other languages like "Modern Hebrew"
or "Arabic", or "English", or 'modern lexicography'. Your Hebrew
ends up being a special breed of language. But you haven't answered
the question if such a system exists in the first place, does one
even need to speculate about a special breed of language?


>>   לא יכלת לכתב על זה ?
> Don’t you know how to write a question in Biblical Hebrew?

איך כותבים שאלות ביהודית/עברית?
Apparently you don't think I know, so teach me. The English
question didn't help.
My question mark was to guarantee that you read it as a
question. The same would have been true if I had started ... הלא,
where you might have misinterpreted me to be using exclamation.
Your handling of texts like Siloam still has the jury out as to
how much Hebrew I should expect you to understand. haken
above doesn't help. Didn't want to say that in public, but your
question elicited the explanation of my word choices. If you
want to continue getting to the bottom of the
etymology/inflexional issue, I suggest that we drop the
question about each other's Hebrew knowledge. The issue is
of importance to those who would start to learn this language.

>>  אם תחפץ אתן לך מלים כמו שֵם ופֹעַל. אם לא, אל תדבר על 'שם' או 'פעל'.
>
> This makes no sense in Biblical Hebrew.

(in a context about how to talk about nouns and verbs)
"if you want, I will give you words like 'Name' and 'Action'.
if not (if you don't want such words), don't talk about 'Name'
and 'Action' . . . talk about things in their vicinity."

>> דבר על דברים מסביבותיהן.
>
> Sorry, feels wrong. Check that last word.

OK, try that last word in the context of its paragraph. I'm sure you'll
figure it out. BTW, -hen refers to the 'milim' in the previous
sentence. The bottom line is that if someone doesn't have a
word for 'cat', then talk about kelabim 'dogs'. The process has
an added benefit of leading to leads to internalization.

>> כי פה יוכלו כל מורינו לבאר את הכתובים בשפת כנען. ואנחנו מוסיפים מלים
>> “בשפת כנען”
> you mean Aramaic, the language spoken in Canaan when that
> prophesy was fulfilled? After all, there was a word at that time for
> Hebrew if Hebrew were meant.

Your comment is too shallow and doesn't help.
After all, there was a word in Isaiah's time if Aramaic was meant,
aramit.
As for Hebrew, they were then using yehudit for the restricted
Southern-Kigdom-Hebrew. sefat Kena`an is better than yedudit.
And the Canaanites didn't think that their language was Aramaic.
Surely not the Phoenicians nor the Philistines. I don't think anyone
ever called Aramaic "Canaanite".

And why didn't I say יהודית? Because I recogniz that יהודית
is specific to Southern-Kingdom Hebrew and prefer the word
attested later, עברית, as more appropriate for the whole language,
for Northern and Southern Kingdom and pre-split-monarchy. But the
person that I was writing to may not have understood my intentions
and might have said that 'it wasn't in the Bible, therefore it isn't BH'.
One needs to read between the lines to see the whole language. It is
obvious to me that עברית is a better choice than יהודית for the whole
language, and the Hebrew-using community has concurred in this
assessment throughout the ages. So if you don't understand
שפת כנען then you will need to accept עברית. yehudit just isn't
broad enough.

> Again, this sentence does not feel right.

That might be a statement in its favor.

> We have no written history pre-Tanakh, and post Tanakh is irrelevant to
> Biblical Hebrew, because it changed.

First of all, I was speaking of the tana"x. But secondly, the history of the
language is still part of the picture, unless you believe and can show
that it changed 100%. If not, then explaining the development in
a natural manner that includes later evidence is still part of any good
theory. Furthermore, any theory that requires more violent changes to
the system is less attractive and would need extra support.

> While reading Tanakh this morning, I came across Ezekiel 42:13 where the
> noun )$M referred to a sacrifice to make amends for guilt, so that concept
> is there.

And the relevance of a 'guilt offering'?
The point is that we can't predict that a pi``el  "ishem" would have meant
'de-guilt'. It could have, but maybe it existed but was limited to 'accuse'.
If the people chose to create and use such a verb, fine. Otherwise, we
can't assume that it existed and certainly not as a given datum with
that meaning. That's the difference between derivational morphology
and inflectional
morphology.

>>> 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'?
>
> Concerning the verb NGD. I didn’t give a detailed answer right away because
> I was away from my study materials.

perfectably understandable.

> Is the verb always a hiphil? What about the many times it is written without
> a medial yod? Sure, many of those times they are hophals, the passive form
> of hiphil (e.g. Genesis 48:2, Judges 4:12, 9:7, 42, 1 Samuel 3:13, 17:31,
> 18:20), with the same basic meaning, but that puts to lie the claim that
> they are all hiphils.

Please try to understand what you are arguing against. You still don't
seem to have understood 'my' position that from language use a hif`il
and a hof`al are the same word. Those truly are inflexional.
higgid and huggad are the same semantic word. Just like pi``el and
pu``al dibber/dubbar are inflexional and the same semantic word. Of
course,
this does require 'thinking outside the box', since beginning grammar
books say that there are 'seven' basic binyanim. But here and there
one hears professors correctly saying 'five'. It's just not in the common
books and is irrelevant to beginners unless they start practicing
etymological fallacies.

> And I wonder how many of the other times that the
> medial yod is missing that they really are piels or puals?

The methodology is flawed. Occam's razor says that you
do not multiply entities unless necessary. If unambiguous
cases are 100% hif`il/hof`al, and there is nothing contrary
that forces another 'word', meaning, or binyan, then there is no
reason to doubt the tradition that has only recorded hif`il/hof`al
in the first place.

> Genesis 14:13 “a survivor came and went before Abram”

Occam's razor has you multiplying entities.
You are taking what would otherwise be clear and
unnecessarily adding something from your imagination.
The next verse says, 'and he heard that Lot...'
filling in the content of higgid. So the context is indirect
speech.

> Genesis 45:26 “They went before their father saying…”

Occam again, plus an explicit לאמר 'saying', correctly used to
mark a communication situation as 'complex' (the complexity
here is that a group is 'speaking' [presumably not in
memorized unison], and perhaps because they were about
to relate other conversations).

> Genesis 47:1 “Joseph came and went before pharaoh and said…”

Occam, and hendiadys for an even more formal structure than
לאמר.
Of course, for physical 'setting before' the author correctly
uses "hitsig" in the next verse. That verb, of course, is NOT used
specifically for speech, even though it is a nice hif`il from a root of
a similar semantic domain. hitsig becomes one more example of why
the binyanim are not 'conjugation/inflexions' but must be
considered to be derivational morphology.

> Numbers 11:27 “And a young man ran and went before Moses
> and said…”

Occam again, and a speech context again. Didn't those BH authors
know that they could use higgid outside of a speech context, that
they could use it in one of those contexts where someone
places/gives/puts/rests/presents/sets up/etc.?
We have hundreds of contexts with physical items as the object of
a 'position' verb, just no example among the hundreds of examples
of higgid.

> Deuteronomy 26:3 “And you will come unto the priest who will be in those
> days and you will say unto him, ‘I am caused to come before YHWH
> your God today, because I came unto the land…’”

You misread. The KI introduces the content of the declaration referred
to in higgid. So again, Occam and a speech context.

> Judges 14:2 “And he ascended and went before his father and his
> mother and he said, …”

Another speech context? There might be 369 of these in the
Bible. You were looking for one that was NOT in a speech context.

> 1 Samuel 14:43 “…and Jonathan stood before him and said…”

Occam plus speech.

> 1 Samuel 18:24 “And Saul’s servants went before him saying, …”

Occam and speech. We can do this all day.

>> Why not say le-haggid means 'to communicate',
>> and be done with it?
>
> This is translation, not with a goal of understanding Biblical Hebrew.

This is your beloved DESCRIPTION, in English. You want it longer?
higgid means 'to transfer information from one person to another.'
What you have done in the examples above is demonstrate that you
prefer to think with etymology rather than along the paths of
attested BH, thereby changing the communication of the BH
author.

> That is, if you believe it is etymology, and not inflection. If it is
> inflection, then it is not the etymological error. Pretty much by
> definition.

'etymology' is not something that one believes in, it is a description
of the history and development of a word. If a word is shown
to refer to communication, and someone insists on its etymological
meaning in a speech context, then that person can be said to be
commiting the etymological fallacy.
When a word refers to "communication" uniquely, 369 times
out of 369, then we say that the word/phrase has lexicalized.
At least that's what we do in any other language.
And I prefer to treat BH like any other language in order to best
preserve and recognize its distinctive identity.

braxot

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