Biblical Hebrew Forum

[K Randolph <kwrandolph AT gmail.com>]

Kimmo:

On Sun, Oct 9, 2011 at 11:53 AM, Kimmo Huovila 
<kimmo.huovila AT kolumbus.fi>wrote:

> On lauantai 08 lokakuu 2011, K Randolph wrote:
> >
> > The best evidence is from within the language itself.
>
> True as long as we know the language itself well. This is like a working on
> a
> jigsaw puzzle. We don't have all the pieces (we have no records of
> classical
> Hebrew syllable structures), so we must look at what kind of piece would
> fit.
> We may not have all that much direct pre-exile Hebrew evidence on syllable
> structures, and no audio recordings from that era, so we should look for
> other
> evidence.
>

“True as long as we know the language itself well.” Exactly, one of my
primary objections. We don’t know Biblical Hebrew well. We are still
debating the Biblical Hebrew verb functions of the forms yiqtol, qatal and
participle, let alone more ephemeral subjects like pronunciation. We know
the language well enough to understand about 99% of the text, but that is
mostly a function of understanding vocabulary, not a function of precise
understanding of grammatical structures.

>
> When we look at how names were transliterated in the LXX (pre-Masoretic,
> but
> post-exile), it looks like there were CVC structures. That would probably
> count as more direct, language-internal evidence (at least the translators
> chose Greek CVC equivalents), unless it is considered too late.
>

Which is about ten generations after evidence of people no longer speaking
Hebrew as primary language, most likely not as native tongue use.

> >
> >
> > The Flood happened around 2500 BC, the Tower of Babel where God mixed up
> the
> > languages some time later when a sufficient population recovery happened
> > after the Flood, probably a couple of centuries later. Was there enough
> time
> > from the Tower of Babel to Abraham to account for all the different
> > languages within the Semitic language family, especially when taking into
> > account that people lived so long at that time? Or when God mixed up the
> > languages, he mixed up some a lot and others not as much, and some within
> > families but already separate enough as not to be mutually
> understandable?
> > We don’t have records of these proto languages, did they ever exist?
>
> This opens a can of worms, and I try to tread carefully within the
> parameters
> of the list.
>

Yes, we are dealing with history, and which historical sources are accurate.
The only reason I brought it up is because of how it effects our
understanding of Biblical Hebrew and its connections with cognate languages.
If it were not for that, I would not have mentioned it.

>
> If we assume the history you mention above, we have a few choices. One is
> to
> think of the time between the Tower of Babel to Abraham to be an intensive
> time of linguistic development. Languages change faster when the society
> experiences changes. I would think a language may split into two different,
> mutually ununderstandable languages within a few centuries in the right
> circumstances. Think about the changes in the English language about a
> millennium ago, for example. Compare 1000 CE English with 1600 CE English,
> and
> think of another language that might have developed in a different
> direction.
> You raise the question of longevity. That is a valid point in this
> scenario.
> In unusual circumstances with small populations of natives language
> variation
> might have been much more prevalent than today. And even nowadays, small
> scale
> linguistic changes occur all the time within the life of an individual. So
> these long-living people might end up being multi-dialectal, speaking one
> dialect with their children and another with their parents.
>

You would also have pockets of isolation where the languages would change
very slowly, e.g. Appalachia in 1930 spoke a dialect of English almost
unchanged from 1730.

As for English, the invasion of those French speaking Vikings under William
the Conquerer had linguistic effects that took centuries to assimilate, The
assimilation was nearing its end at the time of Shakespeare.

>
> Another alternative to consider within the assumptions you expressed is to
> note that the text nowhere says how the languages were confounded, whether
> it
> was a supernatural speeding up of normal language change in some cases, or
> whether all new languages were unrelated to each other.


This only historical record (that I know of) of this historical event is
very sparse on the details, contained in only nine verses. Much of our
understanding of it is based on reconstructions based on comparative
linguistics. The only things we can say for certain in modern terms are 1)
it was a supernatural event that occurred during a building project 2) that
happened so quickly that the building project was abandoned unfinished. From
modern reconstruction it consisted of new languages unrelated to each other
leading to the belief that it happened overnight.


> There is nothing in
> the text to disprove (or prove) the idea that people immediately after the
> tower of Babel spoke their respective Semitic langauges. In other words,
> the
> text does not disprove (or prove) the idea that the languages may have been
> born as cognates with a reconstructable proto-language. If we choose this
> view, our observations on the Semitic languages should convince us that in
> some way they are cognates. There may (or may not) be some unexplicable
> exceptions in this view, but generally speaking comparative Semitics as a
> tool
> is not in danger.
>

Comparative Semitics is not in danger, just speculative “pre-historic”
Semitics is questioned.

>
> Regardless of which of the two views above one may subscribe (and in no way
> do
> I imply that they are the only options), there was proto-Semitic. In the
> first
> scenario, there actually were people that spoke a language very close to
> proto-Semitic. In the second, no one historically spoke it, but
> nevertheless
> it exists as a useful theoretical construct that will help us with Semitic
> studies.
>

But in the specific case of Biblical Hebrew, can lead astray.

>
> I suspect that many on this list don't choose either of the views above.
> But
> for the working linguist, I don't think that whether one chooses either of
> the
> views above, it changes the fact of a Semitic language group and
> the usefulness of comparative Semitic studies. I think for these kinds of
> questions as the syllable structure, it remains a useful tool in any case.
> While of course one can argue that it is not 100% evidence, to dismiss its
> evidence, one needs proper counter-evidence.
>
> What defines proper counter-evidence? See next paragraph.

> >
> > My interest in historical reconstruction started with a question of the
> > alphabet: was it original to Hebrew or did Hebrew adopt it from another
> > language? If originally from Hebrew, then Hebrew originally had only 22
> > consonantal phonemes, and the theories from the historical linguists are
> > wrong. I think the evidence from history is that the Hebrew alphabet is
> > original to Hebrew. We have inscriptional evidence of the Hebrew alphabet
> in
> > use during the time of the Egyptian sojourn before the Exodus.
> >
> > My question concerning whether Biblical Hebrew was originally a CV
> language
> > also stems from the same historical question of the alphabet. The reason
> is
> > that some of the words would not have been pronounceable without
> intervening
> > vowels, e.g. Rivka would have been pronounced as Rebeqah (or even
> Rebeqahe)
> > with the e between the b and q an unstressed shewa.
>
> Are you perhaps referring to air flow after the release of b and before the
> full closure of q? (Even in this case, the air flow can be pronounced as
> unvoiced.) Transitional sounds between phonemes do not affect syllable
> structure nor should they be treated as phonemic. Phonology works at a
> different level of abstraction from transitional sounds between phonemes.
>
> The example of Rebecca is found in transliterations from Hebrew to Greek.
Whether it causes phonemic change, i.e. the change of one to the other
causes meaning change, I see no evidence of that. On a lower level, it does
indicate phonic change.

> >
> > Yes, it would be a lot of work, and even before starting it it looks
> wrong
> > from a historical standpoint, so why go through the effort? And it would
> > interfere with my main effort of trying to get a feeling for Biblical
> Hebrew
> > from the inside out.
>
> Sometimes to get really good at one thing, it is important to take time to
> develop also skills closer to the margins of relevance to the main task.
> Like
> Randall has often said, if the main goal is reading, learning to speak will
> not be wasted effort. But I agree that large doses of comparative Semitics
> may
> not be the best thing to get a feeling of Biblical Hebrew. Some bits and
> pieces may enliven your journey through Hebrew, though. Some later Hebrew
> is
> very good, as well as some earlier Hebrew would be, if we just had lots of
> texts from an earlier time.
>

I would really like it if we had ten times the number of words written in
Tanakh in other Biblical Hebrew documents dating from Biblical times. That
would answer many questions.

My main interest has been and remains the reading of the text. Reading the
text does not require a conscious recognition of exact forms in order to
understand the flow of thought, as has been shown by numerous studies where
deliberate linguistic errors (e.g. speling misteaks) have been presented and
shown not to affect understanding. Speaking the language, on the other hand,
does require a conscious recognition of exact forms, and the challenges
presented by discussions on this forum have sharpened my knowledge, shown me
small quirks of the language, but have also led me to question the
pronunciation (the possibility of Biblical Hebrew being a CV language is one
question) and have led me to recognize grammatical structures that I had not
consciously thought about before. While I have not developed the skill for
fluent speaking, just dabbling in it has improved my reading skills. But the
same greater attention to detail has led me to reject some of the
conclusions of comparative Semitics, such as the existence of proto-Semitic
and its effects on early Biblical Hebrew.

>
> Kimmo Huovila
>

Karl W. Randolph.