Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Pere Porta <pporta7 AT gmail.com>]

Phil,

for your purposes, maybe you can find some help in this link:

www.oham.net

It does still not fully work but, as I'm saying, it can be helpful for your
purposes.

Kind regards

Pere Porta
(Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain)

2010/10/26 Phil King <phil_king AT sil.org>

> I’m teaching a course in Biblical Hebrew starting next week to Papua New
> Guinean Bible Translators and looking for some ideas to teach stems and
> conjugations in ways that will ‘stick’ and that don’t rely too much on
> English.
>
> This will be the second course for all these folk, who have already taken a
> course based half on Randy Buth’s Living Biblical Hebrew, half on
> dramatizations of the Elijah stories. So they are able to read Hebrew
> writing fairly well, and have an intuitive grasp of basic grammar, but
> haven’t yet been exposed to much, if any, grammatical terminology. I have
> them for four weeks and want to try and create a bridge from their
> elementary intuitive understanding of the grammar and vocabulary to a stage
> where they can relate to lexicons, commentaries, software etc. that refer to
> qal, piel, hiphil,… and perfect, imperfect, imperative etc…
>
> The challenge is that these folks all come from different language groups,
> have limited English, and very limited linguistic background. Also I’m
> trying to get them to think of grammatical categories through the categories
> of their own vernaculars rather than through English (or Latin) categories.
> So I like to do things through pictures, drama and action – to help them
> cognitively link straight from Hebrew to their own vernaculars without
> getting bogged down in English in between.
>
> I’m wondering if anyone has any resources or ideas for pictures, dramas or
> actions that could help them conceptually grasp the different stems and the
> different conjugations? For example, perhaps we could act out together
> qatalti, niqtalti, qitalti, hiqtalti, hitqatalti (excuse the spellings) in a
> way that would give them a visual ‘peg’ to hang the stem concepts onto – but
> as this root is actually so rare in Biblical Hebrew, and I’m not totally
> sure what qitalti would mean – I wonder if anyone has other ideas? I’d been
> thinking sh-b-r might be easier – although I’m not sure how to act out
> ‘being broken’. Is there another good root which actually shows up in
> several different stems, that could be somewhat easily acted out? Or does
> anyone have a good set of different verbs – one for each conjugation – that
> could be acted out?
>
> For conjugations, I’ve seen Greek books which represent aorist as a dot and
> other tenses as lines or sequences of dots, but I’m not sure that really
> works for perfect vs. imperfect. Nor an idea someone else used for Greek
> with people stepping forward for future and backwards for aorist – that
> would suggest too much tense orientation for the Hebrew to my mind, as
> opposed to aspect or other interpretations of the different forms. Are there
> established visual ways of conceptualizing the meanings of Hebrew
> conjugations, that we could either draw or act out?
>
> Has anyone else ever done anything like this, or have any ideas they could
> share?
>
> Thanks,
> Phil King
> SIL PNG
>
>
>
> PS. I know that many lexicographers would teach different stems as entirely
> separate semantic entities, and so that would undermine the idea here – but
> in terms of using lexicons and relating to other grammar books, the root and
> stem approach is still going to give them some conceptual help.
> _______________________________________________
> b-hebrew mailing list
> b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org
> http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/b-hebrew
>



-- 
Pere Porta
"Ei nekrói ouk eguéirontai, fágomen kai píomen áurion gar apothnéskomen"
(1Cor 15:32)