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  • From: dwashbur AT nyx.net
  • To: B-Hebrew <b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] lock without a key
  • Date: Tue, 02 Nov 2010 16:21:19 -0700



On 2 Nov 2010 at 14:44, fred burlingame wrote:

>
> Hello Dave:
>
> Thanks for your informative comments.
>
> Some people discount, and some people inflate, the differing
> characteristics of apples and
> oranges. Differences abound however, between these plant products;
> andas anyone can see.
>
> Likewise;
>
> a. when the hebrew text employs one set of three letters to
> express bothverb and noun; and to
> manifest different nounmeanings in repetitive usage of close
> proximity;
>
> b. when the correspondingenglish text utilizes wholly unrelated
> words to translate this single
> hebrew word, appearing repetitively in close proximity;
>
> c. when this circumstance repeates chronically across the large
> masoretic text with other hebrew
> words;
>
> such conditions render the hebrew originaland english
> translationakin to apples and oranges,
> no matter what significance becomes attached to the distinctions
> (such as semantics or
> whimsical).

As you say, we are looking at sets of three letters expressing different
things. When there's
a limited corpus of graphemes, that's going to happen.

1. He couldn't bear the thought that his brother had been killed by a bear;
the bearing his
brother followed should not have taken him near any wildlife.

Here we have three instances of the same four-letter sequence, and none of
the meanings
are related. Two are nouns (one technically a gerund) and one is a verb, and
if we were to
render this sentence into another language, the target language would have to
utilize very
different words in each case to render that four-letter English sequence. We
can, with tools
like TWOT, assume that such letter sequences in Hebrew must be related, and
try to find
connections among their usages (in this case, the notion of "power" must be
stretched a bit,
at least IMNSHO), or we can examine them in situ, determine what they mean
from context,
and adjust our translations accordingly. I have very little interest in
diachronic semantics, so
I choose the latter.

Dave Washburn

http://www.nyx.net/~dwashbur




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