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  • From: fred putnam <fred.putnam AT gmail.com>
  • To: Arnaud Fournet <fournet.arnaud AT wanadoo.fr>
  • Cc: Biblical Hebrew <b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] cognate alphabet
  • Date: Thu, 25 Nov 2010 12:09:58 -0500

Arnaud,

I'm not going to quibble about historical ascription; the lecture was 1786,
the book was published in 1788. Thanks for the reference to Lyle Campbell's
essay; there is, however, a reason for the common ascription to Jones
position in this field (even allowing Campbell's long list of alleged
"fathers/founders" (86) and quotation from Jager (88) aside). I do not know
that reason.

You are clearly far more up on all this than I. Thanks for your patient
instruction.

I have enjoyed this thread, but we are moving far outside b-hebrew, and I
must curtail my participation in it.

Peace.

Fred


On Thu, Nov 25, 2010 at 7:56 AM, Arnaud Fournet
<fournet.arnaud AT wanadoo.fr>wrote:

>
> From: fred putnam
>
>
> 2. Right--Hurrian was Hurro-Urartian. Sorry.
> ***
> No big deal.
> I understood it as an obvious typo.
> A.
> ***
>
>
>
> 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),
> ***
> 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.
> ***
>
>
>
> 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).
> ***
> I'm not aware that Saussure may have been of any use in that field !
> Interesting.
> A.
> ***
>
>
>
> 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.
> ***
> 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.
> ***
>
>
>
> 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).
> ***
> 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
>



--
--)---------------
"We are not yet what we already are" (J. Pieper).

Frederic Clarke Putnam, Ph.D. | Professor of Biblical Studies
Philadelphia Biblical University | 200 Manor Avenue | Langhorne, PA
19047-2990
http://pbu.edu | 1215-702-4502 | Fax: 1-215-702-4533 | www.fredputnam.org

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