Biblical Hebrew Forum

[K Randolph <kwrandolph AT gmail.com>]

Randall:

On 9/5/10, Randall Buth <randallbuth AT gmail.com> wrote:
>>> The lack of yod is the expected form of a Hif`il imperative without
>>> a suffix.
>> But what about the many times that the medial yod is missing in narrative?
>
> What about them?
> The BH context was a conversation with a command.
> It was illegitimate to contest my reading on the
> grounds of 'no yod' since 'no yod' was the correct and best form
> for that reading in the first place.

Even if you can prove that this one example is hiphil, there are
dozens of other cases where it can be questioned. Most of those are
not commands, so you can’t hide behind that for them.
>
>>> >> 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.
>>
>> You didn’t answer my question.
>
> The definition came from reading BH, something so obvious
> as to not need explicit statement, especially since your statement
> of that process had lead you to a mistake.

The reason I ask is that is not the definition I find from reading BH.
In my case, I supplemented that reading by making focused studies with
the aid of a concordance and comparing with synonyms. That is why your
answer is not obvious. That is also why I expect that your
understanding is colored by cognate studies, including the cognates of
later versions of Hebrew.
>
>> Another thing, I look at words for the actions they refer to,
>
> except that when higgid refers to communication

Which you have not proven, it can refer to an action ancillary to
communication, an understanding that the hiphil inflection supports.

> you want to
> pull apart its root 'to be opposite, in front of' and make it a
> physical, positional description, presumably transitive (that is,
> 'to cause something to be in front').
> Maybe another perspective will help you. Ask yourself what is
> 'caused to be in front' when higgid is used?

At least one example that I pointed to it was not a message.

> In other words, what is the object of the hif`il verb higgid?
> Is it not the content of a communication?

Not always. In some of the verses it appears that the communication is
ancillary to the action of the context.
>
> [follow up on the issue follows after a few side issues]
>
>> questions start with a prefixed (prefixed to the
>> sentence or phrase that is a question) ה heh. So the sentence
>> should have started with הלא
>
> if you do not know or accept that yes/no questions can begin without
> a he-, then that needs to be a different thread, though it's too late
> to tell biblical writers like David and Job. And it is tangential to
> derivational morphology and Hebrew.

Give examples.
>
>> Then in your follow-up question, there are other errors: יהודית does not
>> take a prefix, as in Isaiah 36:11, the same way ארמית in the same verse;
>
> correct. yehudit does not need to take a prefix. I specified the means
> in order to keep it separate from the object for you.

Why add something that is not attested to in BH? Doesn’t that addition
imply amateurism?

> By all means drop
> the be- if you understand it. But this overlooks something that is
> almost a first. We actually communicated ! This is something that
> isn't happening in English, apparently, and didn't happen in previous
> BH.
>
>> כותבים is usually יכתב איש in Hebrew,

That was my first reaction when reading your question, however when
answering your question, I made a quick check with an electronic
search through Tanakh and did not find any clear examples of exactly
that form of question, so I went with the example from Ruth.

> making that question איך תכתבו שאלות
>> יהודית , e.g. Ruth 3:18.
> Just when things were communicating, we get adiaphora. Why change to
> 2plural? Why bother changing the TAM when it communicated within
> bounds ("usually" and "less-usually" would both be BH).

Because you wrote in plural, so for your sake I decided to stay with
the plural. The singular is found in Tanakh, e.g. 1 Kings 2:16, 20,
Isaiah 7:11. My preference would have been to change it to a singular.
>
>> I have been known not to catch everything, so can you give me Biblical
>> examples of exclamations starting with הלא ?

All you need is two or three, then all you need to do is list the
verses, then be done with it. Does it really need a whole thread to
itself?
>
> Not in this thread. Again, this is a case of something that I assume is
> already known. A given. If not, then it needs another thread since it is
> irrelevant to higgid and hif`il.
>
>>> >>  אם תחפץ אתן לך מלים כמו שֵם ופֹעַל. אם לא, אל תדבר על 'שם' או 'פעל'.
>>> >
>>> > This makes no sense in Biblical Hebrew.
> ...
>> You are using words in ways never found in Biblical Hebrew.
>
> 'Name'/noun and 'Action'/verb were given to you as neologisms

Yes, I recognized that, however, if I want to stay strictly within
Biblical Hebrew where I can point to verses that use these terms, I
find none where they are used that way.
>
>>>> 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.
>
> Another digression, ignoring that Isaiah had a good word for Aramaic
> that he didn't use.

What’s wrong with ארמית ?
>
>> Samaria having been deported and those who replaced Samaria did
>> not speak Hebrew.
>
> And we know this because they used a Hebrew Bible? Sort of a
> non-sequitur.

That isn’t evidence that the returning Jews after the Babylonian Exile
spoke Hebrew as the language of market and hearth, so why should it be
evidence for those who did not speak Hebrew originally?
>
>> Where is your evidence that the Northern Kingdom spoke a different Hebrew
>> before they were deported?
>
> Oh, inscriptions found in the Northern Kingdom like shat for shana, and
> incongruities in the biblical text, and geographical probabilities, and
> stories
> like Shibbolet 'rapids, whitewater'.

OK, this one will need its own thread.
>
>>> 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.
>>
>> So some of the binyanim are inflections, and some etymologies? Or are you
>> saying that groups or pairs of inflections are etymologies? I don’t see
>> the
>> logic of your position. Previously, from the way you argued, I had the
>> impression that you thought that all binyanim are etymologies.
>
> If a 'binyan' is a lexicalization (that is, a 'word' in street English),
> then pi``el and pu``al are only automatic transforms, inflexions,
> of the same lexeme/word.
> Same with hif`il. I've thought so for over three decades, reconfirmed
> without contradiction in thousands of hours of BH reading.
> So did the Arabs, who invented the description of "binyanim". But you
> and I cannot talk about Arabic, so you need to understand what I have
> been saying and have not been saying about BH.
> In addition, etymology refers to the history of a word,
> not the synchronic use of a word. le-haggid is not 'an etymology', but
> it would have an etymology. But taking a synchronic use of a word
> and re-defining it according to it history rather than its developed use is
> called an 'etymological fallacy'. In any language.
>
>> I don’t believe in Occam. I have seen too many examples in many areas that
>> show the fallacy of that thought.
>
> OK. Though you have now permitted yourself the luxury of creating
> fictive, unrestrainable worlds, of creating and following unnecessary
> conceptions of a language. And then declaring all others wrong
> who do not follow your unnecessary conception.

Look, I readily admit I did not come up through the university system,
I was not indoctrinated in the traditions of what goes for modern
scholarship (Occam does not work outside of that tradition), yours is
possibly the only modern name I heard of before joining this mail
list, instead the only pattern I learned was to treat Biblical Hebrew
no differently than when learning other, modern languages. That
includes (for me especially) how to recognize the meanings of words
and their uses. “For me especially” because I find that the hardest
part of learning foreign languages is acquiring vocabulary and
learning when and where properly to use words. That is why I spent
more time working as a lexicographer than any other aspect of learning
Biblical Hebrew, apart from reading the text itself, and memorizing
chapters and verses.

What this means in discussions is that you cannot rest on your laurels
as a famous scholar, nor can you point to other scholars with whom I
am completely unfamiliar, rather you’ll have to do as I do, namely
cite Bible verses that give examples of where I am mistaken.
>
>> It is you who claims that different binyan are different meanings. I
>> disagree with that.
>
> No you don't disagree with that. ba 'came' and hebi' 'brought' have
> different meanings and stipulate a different set of 'arguments'
> (to use language from logic about the 'cases' of a predication).

Bad example, because “bringing” is causing someone or something to
come. Whereas in English we use different words, Biblical Hebrew uses
different binyanim to express the same action.

> What you disagree with, is my claim that a binyan is not always
> predictable. Stated positively, you claim that a pi``el and hif`il is
> always predictable from a root meaning. And you have overlooked
> the fact that if your claim were true, then there could be no
> historical development of the Hebrew verb-root system.

Within the confines of Tanakh, I have made note of the paucity of
evidence of grammatical change in Biblical Hebrew. There were literary
stylistic changes over time, and a few cases of where common ways of
saying things changed, but almost no language changes. That includes
definition of terms.

After Tanakh there were many changes, but that is outside of the realm
of this discussion group.
>
>
> Again, your conception of BH becomes unrealistically static.
> Apparently, your nouns like 'qedesha' and 'nagid' can have
> etymological development from their root, but verbs can't.

To me it sounds as if you are arguing that “stewed” can have a
different etymological meaning that “to stew” or “will stew”. As long
as those are inflections, they won’t. But once that inflectional
connection is lost, then they can have different etymological
development.

I have never denied that root meanings can change, only that within
Tanakh the language stayed remarkably stable, more stable than I
expected.

Apparently after Tanakh the inflectional connections were lost, then
they became etymologies, as you claim. But I don’t see any evidence of
that within Tanakh.
> …
>
> Hello? When I look over your list I can't find one. It would have
> helped if you specified it. Since you didn't, I will need to. Then,
> you will be able to say, that you meant a different one.
> Whatever.
> Maybe you referred to:
>>This search has also caused me to revise slightly my understanding of
>> the verb, to a more activist meaning, namely more of “to go
>> before” more than “to be before”, and where there is an object, “to set
>> before”. ...
>>
>> Genesis 14:13 “a survivor came and went before Abram”
>
> As mentioned above, this is a mistake concerning the nature
> of a hif`il.

Here is an example of where the consonantal text could be a qal, or a
piel—the lack of a medial yod argues against this being a hiphil.
Though you could also argue that this was a hophal, to keep it within
the hiphil/hophal family, but then the implication is that Abram’s
servants found the escapee and brought him before Abram.

There are dozens of examples where one can read the unpointed text as
a piel or even qal.

>
> This illustrates a basic methodological problem. You want
> to have the right to unnecessarily change the meaning of a
> BH word,

“Unnecessarily”? Or is it that the tradition that you represent is not
always accurate?

> here you want to change le-haggid into an
> intransitive synonym of 'to come'. You don't wince at its
> lack of support,

What I find is a lack of support for a claim that it is always a
hiphil. Further, I find a lack of support that the action referenced
by the verb is the communication itself even where it is used in the
semantic field of communications.
>
> Now I need to go learn Swahili. Yes, this is a real aside.
>
> braxot
>
> --
> Randall Buth, PhD
> www.biblicalulpan.org
> randallbuth AT gmail.com
> Biblical Language Center
> Learn Easily - Progress Further - Remember for Life
>
The question of the subject title is: are the binyanim inflections or
synonyms (etymologies)? You are arguing that they are etymologies, but
so far I don’t see any evidence that backs up your claims. You
weakened your case when you admitted that hophal is an inflection of
hiphil, and in this message appear to extend that also to piel and
pual.

As for word meanings, I have seen a lot of what I call “sloppy
lexicography” by Gesenius and his disciples, That may impact your
responses to my statements. Part of that is that my Reformation
theology induces me to look for actions, whereas the humanism of
Gesenius and many of his disciples lead them to look for form. When I
look at the actions, the inflectional nature of the binyanim becomes
more evident. You’ll need hard data to convince me otherwise.

Karl W. Randolph.