Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Randall Buth <randallbuth AT gmail.com>]

On Wed, Oct 5, 2011 at 4:24 AM, K Randolph <kwrandolph AT gmail.com> wrote:

> Randall:
> ...
> To be serious, when I hear people consistently speaking using a syntax
> where there is a pronoun followed by a verb in a participle form in the same
> way as English uses the present tense verb, it sounds like modern Israeli
> Hebrew which has a tense based verbal usage. In Biblical use, it can be used
> that way, e.g. Genesis 37:6, Deuteronomy 30:16, but also for the future e.g.
> Genesis 19:13, Deuteronomy 3:21, 4:14, 30:18. While I haven’t looked, I
> would not be surprised if the participle is also used for the past as well.
>

For clarity, it would help if you would quote at least one or two examples
rather than list numbers.
Gen 37.6 there is no participle
Gen 37 16 et aHai ani mebaqqesh את אחי אני מבקש
classic BH syntax: fronted item (aHay) as marked salient information (a.k.a.
Focus) that answers the question, followed by the default 'core', which is
אני מבקש. The participle was correctly chosen for describing something
already in process, an actual present.
Dt 30.16 אשר אנכי מצוך היום
classic BH syntax: subject+participle without any special pragmatic marking.
Moses was not speaking English or modern Hebrew, just good biblical Hebrew.

With any language, a personn must learn which structures to match with which
situations. The linguists can come later and name such relationships. Your
note about a participle being used in future contexts, while also correct,
is irrelevant here. The situation was an actual, ongoing present. The
participle was correctly chosen. And the subject pronoun was correctly
placed in front of the participle according to the HEBREW language, Joseph
did not know English or what Hebrew would become. In BH, whenever the
participle is chosen in a default description of a situation the 'doer' will
be placed in front of the participle. If the participle precedes the
subject, you will invariably find that it fits as marked, salient
information to its context.
Gen 19.13 משחיתים אנחנו
the participle is fronted, definitely a candidate as marked salient
information, something  assumed to be quite unpredictable for the listener
and benefitting from the rhetorical underlining that fronting can provide
(assuming a different intonation from another fronting function
'topicalization'). The time reference is future, though the structure
presents this as a 'connected future' (approx.="are going to DESTROY...")
Cf. Gen 15.14 וגם את הגוי אשר יעבדו דן אנכי
Two items are fronted before the default order. The first is 'the people
whom they will serve' and it is a topicalization, a marking to relate to the
larger context, 'as for those people ...' The second fronting is 'am going
to judge'. In other words: '[you might think that those people will get off
lightly, but I ...] AM GOING TO JUDGE THEM. (the participle is fronted as
marked, salient information, a.k.a. Focus. And it is used in a future
context that can be considered to be presented as a 'connected future' (this
is a common type of communication across language families).
Dt 3.21 אשר אתה עבר שמה
 4:14, אשר אתם עברים שמה לרשתה
30:18אשר אתה עבר את הירדן לבוא שמה לרשתה
all default participle clauses, subject before participle. describing a
future event and presenting it as a 'connected future' "are going to cross
to enter the land to possess it". Please note: subject before participle is
default HEBREW, and has nothing to do with English. It's just the way it is.


Now, you will need to watch and see what structures are used in 'actual
present' contexts that are 1. not questions, ('would you pay for the
dinner?') 2. not habituals (habituals like 'I run' are not 'actual
presents', 'I am running'), 3. preferably not poetry where the presentation
of events can purposefully put things in an etherial plane (quasi-habitual,
or potential). Start with concrete situations where clarity can be assured
and a poetic factor cannot be a contributing influence. Those structures
that are used in 'plain jane' prosaic conversation become a sure-footed
guide and will be the structures of choice in a classroom. English, Chinese,
Greek and Swahili have nothing to do with it. And also note that
finding חפצתי and ידעתי structures does not negate the correctness of אני
יודע and אני רואה. (I write 'full' for disambiguation, if you prefer, you
may have אני ראה and אני ידע. The language is the same.)

Of course, I have long ago done this, which is why I say ani holek while I
am walking. Thou quickly criticizeth what thou seemeth not to understand.
You are allowed your opinion, but then it goes against the reliability of
your judgement when it does not reveal BH nuance. None of the above is
'modern Hebrew' or 'English'. Judging it so might reveal a lack of control
of BH. That lack is actually endemic in the field and many BH teachers do
not know how to correctly say a default, plain jane, BH 'the man is standing
there' or 'I see a black cow in the field'. That situation is changing, but
slowly.

There is a second item that is involved in a classroom that has nothing to
do with the above or with participles. That is something that is called
'caretaker speech'. Caretaker speech is slow, enunciated, often repeated,
and sometimes using simplified structures/vocab with beginning learners and
infants (different but similar to "run, Spot, run. Oh, see Jane run!). Since
it doesn't involve participles, I won't elaborate, but it is a natural phase
of language learning. (E.g., Greek participles and Hebrew vav-ha-hippux
structures typically need multi-clausal contexts before they can be
naturally used, but students are limited to single sentence utterances at
the beginning.)

> My personal understanding in the verses listed above is that the participle
> in Hebrew is used more in the nominal sense rather than verbal sense,
>

You will need to define your terms 'verbal sense' and 'nominal sense' in
order for them to be useful, otherwise they do not communicate anything. All
of the ones that you mentioned above were predications (a.k.a. "verbal
sense", supplying the predication frame for a
clause/statement/proposition). Now discussion in English is not limited to
English parameters, of course, general linguistic discussion is adequate to
handle this, it simply needs proper definition. But to do this clearly, you
may need to talk about semantic terms and functions like 'agents' and
'predication frames'. Along these same lines some Hebraists have just
confused themselves and their students by calling האנשים הלכו  a 'nominal
clause' and הלכו האנשים a 'verbal clause'. That kind of talk simply lacks a
semantic basis and is no better than gobblygook. The default semantics of
both of those sentences is identical, the pragmatics differ. The predication
in both clauses is 'walk', there is no semantic predication function of
'identification' or 'constituent decription', a.k.a. "nominal sense". (PS:
telling us that ani mavaqqesh might really mean something closer to  "i am a
seeker'" does not explain the semantics correctly. Joseph was explaining
what he was doing, not discussing his role in society nor filling in a
predication "I am an X".)



> And the point of this whole discussion, lest it be obscured, is that
>> students will learn Shakespearian English much better by using the
>> language
>> in real communication than by discussing Shakespeare in Russian. The one
>> will have an opportunity to reach 'second-language-user' fluency, while
>> the
>> Russian-only speaker will never develop that skill in English. A linguist
>> can analyze a language, but to rapidly think and process within the
>> language
>> they must undergo a long process of communicative language use.
>>
>> In the following I am assuming long time study by those involved.
>
>

Great.


>
>
The problem for both the Russian who learns only Shakespearian English and
> the modern English speaking person, is that both are learning Shakespearian
> English as a second language. As such, neither will learn Shakespearian
> English as well as a native speaker who lived during Shakespeare’s time.
>
> The question comes up, who can have a better capacity to recognize a
> forgery produced by a modern speaker trying to emulate Shakespearian
> English? The Russian speaker who knows only Shakespearian English, or the
> modern speaker for whom any deviation from Shakespearian English will be
> unconsciously familiar to him from modern English?
>

Well, in the above discussion on אני הולך it was the 'Russian' who
incorrectly cried 'foul'.

PS:
I see that Georg Athas has apparently responded to your response.
George is correct. A classroom situation will change the percentages of
usage. A person must always ask if a proper structure is being matched to
the proper situation. If so, then it is good BH. This we do, and we find
that the more language processed and used, the better students become and
the more sensitive they become to the language that they are reading. If any
differences are encountered, the immediate question becomes, 'what is the
author doing?' 'why did he choose that?'
Language will self-correct if you let it. (yes, 'plateau'ing is also a
phenomenon, but we are not talking about that, here.) For example, following
on the discussion above, let's say that a teacher extrapolates from a
grammar book that אעמד פה e`mod po is the correct way to say 'I am standing
here' and תשב שם teshev sham 'you are sitting there'. The teacher will find
example after example where BH uses a structure like אני עומד פה and אתה
יושב שם. Each occurrence should raise a question. Eventually, they will
start to use the same structure. Language will have 'self-corrected'. A
person first becomes sensitive by asking questions out of the box, and then
adapts to BH.




> > Will Parsons
> Karl W. Randolph.
>
>


-- 
Randall Buth, PhD
www.biblicallanguagecenter.com
Biblical Language Center
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