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b-hebrew - Re: [b-hebrew] cognate alphabet

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  • From: "Arnaud Fournet" <fournet.arnaud AT wanadoo.fr>
  • To: "fred putnam" <fred.putnam AT gmail.com>
  • Cc: Biblical Hebrew <b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] cognate alphabet
  • Date: Thu, 25 Nov 2010 13:56:47 +0100


From: fred putnam

2. Right--Hurrian was Hurro-Urartian. Sorry.
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No big deal.
I understood it as an obvious typo.
A.
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5. Ferdinand de Saussure was the first person to separate synchronic and diachronic approaches to language. The diachronic approach, which dominated the study of language in the 19th and early 20th centuries (following the lead established by William Jones, 1788),
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Actually 1786.

Now the idea that this period was really "diachronic" is a bit a reconstruction of the past. These people had what I would call the "flat screen" syndrome. Their "history" is in fact flat and the "changes" are more immanent reformulations of the same ever-existing things. The tendency to deal with "originally" and "at the origin", etc. is also a serious indication that they deal with an implicitly ultra-short chronology, as if Proto-Indo-European or Proto-Semitic or Proto-Hebrew were close to the "origin(s)". They are closer to achronic than diachronic.

It is also clear that the influence of Jones, who is often touted as an initiator, is now dismissed.
I would recommend you read Chapter4 by Lyle Campbell in the Handbook of Linguistics, especially the ยง4 in Chapter4. The book is (or was) available as pdf on the web.
In addition Jones made a number of idiotic statements about Hindi being Altaic instead of a daughter language of Sanskrit...

A.
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assumed that etymology rather than use determines meaning (a theory most publicly set aside by Webster's Third New International Dictionary (1961), and decried with regard to its abuse in biblical studies by James Barr in The Semantics of Biblical Language (also 1961).
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I'm not aware that Saussure may have been of any use in that field !
Interesting.
A.
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De Saussure's famous analogy was that the studying a language is like analyzing game of chess: we can examine the sequence of moves that lead to a particular position on the board (diachronic analysis), or we can study that position (synchronic analysis), in which case the moves that brought the game to that point are essentially meaningless--it doesn't matter how the pieces arrived at their current positions; all that matters is where they are and what they can do from that point on.
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The analogy is to some extent false as in not few cases you need to know past moves to tell what's legal or possible.
A.
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7. I'm afraid that we seem to be talking past each other at this point. I say that they are not related, you say they are (distantly). If so, it is a distance so remote that no one has yet discovered the connection. A study done a number of years ago (I forget the source, perhaps Hebrew Education?) demonstrated that American seminary students who had studied even one other Indo-European languages found it easier to learn Greek than those who had not, whereas studying a Indo-European language--any language--did not help those same students when they studied Hebrew. This suggests a far remove indeed (although, as you suggest, my reading in linguistics may not be as current as yours).
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Yes maybe
In all cases Semitic is nevertheless very much like IE languages typologically.
I suppose Greek is felt to be easy because there are plenty of Greek words in modern European languages.

Best

Arnaud Fournet




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