Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Arnaud Fournet" <fournet.arnaud AT wanadoo.fr>]

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 §4 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