Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Randall Buth <randallbuth AT gmail.com>]

We 'essentially' agree on the mishnaic part.

On Sat, May 21, 2011 at 1:25 AM, Isaac Fried <if AT math.bu.edu> wrote:
> Since you refer to my "worldview", permit me to briefly reiterate, at the
> end of this discussion, what I said earlier: I tend to think that biblical
> Hebrew was never a spoken language.

If one starts speaking 'biblical' it doesn't take long before one
realizes that wayyiqtol and weqatal need to be treated as separate
tense-aspects in their own right. In antiquity, I think that little kids
learned those verbs in that way, without comparing them to
`atid and `abar verbs. Note the way in which an Arad letter 16
slides right into the weqatal as its own tense-aspect:
        וְעַתָּ כְּצֵאתִי מִבֵּיתְךָ    and now , after leaving your house
        וְשָׁלַחְתִּי אֶת הַ[כ]סֶף      and I will (certainly) send  the 
[m]oney

The language flows quite naturally.

On the other hand, it is approaching the
biblical text from either modern or mishnaic that may add to
the sensation that there is something 'formal' about the language.
Of course it's formal. It is literature, after all.

> I imagine that people who spoke Hebrew
> at home spoke a simplified version thereof. At the wane of the era of the
> prophets the written language started to come down towards this vernacular.
> Then, the rabbis, HA-PRU$IYM, who were not part of the temple milieu, and
> who spoke directly to the people about urgent practical matters, reverted
> entirely to the speech of the land, culminating in the terse Mishnah.
> Namely, I tend to think that, essentially, "Mishnaic" Hebrew was there all
> along.
>
> There is no denying that "Mishnaic" Hebrew absorbed words and turns of
> speech from both Aramaic and Greek. This light version of biblical Hebrew is
> essentially what some call now "Modern" Hebrew.

The operating word is 'essentially'. It is still distinct. I think that it
is more historically transparent and accurate to say that Mishnaic
Hebrew was the Low language that became visable rather than
jump to 'Modern Hebrew'.
One could also say that modern Hebrew is essentially mishnaic Hebrew
dressed up in biblical morphology and
expanded for the modern world in the same way that mishnaic Hebrew
was expanded for its 'modern world' back then.

Somehow one must remember that biblical qarata 'you read' became
mishanic qarita 'you read', but now it is back to qarata 'you read'.

> So, what Abba Bendavid calls L$ON XAXAMIYM, the language of the wise and the
> learned, I would call L$ON AM HA-AREC, the language of the people of the
> land.

Yes. Very well put. I often forget that people often think of the name
'laguage of the wise' within of framework of renaissance Latin when in
fact the name referred to the 'teachers' language' and meant 'NOT the
high language', not classical, biblical Hebrew.

Randall Buth

> Isaac Fried, Boston University
>
> On May 19, 2011, at 11:41 PM, Randall Buth wrote:
>
> The point is that there was a stage of the language called
> Mishnaic that your worldview doesn't seem to have much
> room for. Abba Bendavid's leshon miqra ulshon Haxamim
> 2vol 1967, is a good place to start.
>



-- 
Randall Buth, PhD
www.biblicallanguagecenter.com
Biblical Language Center
Learn Easily - Progress Further - Remember for Life