Biblical Hebrew Forum

[John Leake <jesleake AT yahoo.co.uk>]

Karl, the technical term for your concept (as I'm sure you know) is 'language interference' or 'second language interference'. Of course it is a problem. But the same must be true, though, within Biblical Hebrew itself of different periods, though I can't think of examples.

Uri's right in that we can't interrogate Biblical Hebrew speakers (or our own knowledge of the language) for a broader context for a word that might only appear a couple of times in the Bible and cognates are a helpful tool towards a closer understanding of the Hebrew. But I agree that it's a double-edged sword. As John Healey, I think, remarked to me during an interview to read Semitic Languages many years ago, we can't treat words in cognate languages as somehow interchangeable; a knowledge of cognates may help us toward the meaning of an obscure word (or a common word whose meaning had shifted between the author's writing it down and the writing of the Septuagint) but we still have to try to see how it works in Hebrew and to keep them separate in our own minds. We know that a simplistic etymological approach in Hebrew is often misleading as a word - once formed - takes on meanings of its own, particularly during times of transformation (so theological terms that have broader Canaanite religious use are likely to have been redefined in the move to monotheism), this being especially true with loan words which are so often borrowings of secondary meanings and which soon take on their own flavour. The same misleading potential is true of cognates: the likelihood is that choosing a meaning of an Arabic cognate from a list of meanings in a lexicon without seeing where the word is used in context in the language is fraught with danger. If, for example, we didn!t know the word מדינה in Hebrew, would Arabic /madīna/ be helpful? Historically in Arabic it doesn't really mean 'city', which would be our natural - and misleading - choice, but without an etymological dictionary (and none exists that I know of) it's hard to unravel the meaning of such a word in terms of its meaning in a given period. It's worth reading Janes Barr's _Comparative Philology and the Text of the Old Testament_, where he examines the pros and cons in some detail.

John Leake

Open University

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ان صاحب حياة هانئة لا يدونها انما يحياها

He who has a comfortable life doesn't write about it - he lives it

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On 28 Apr 2013, at 04:15, Barry <nebarry AT verizon.net> wrote:

On 4/27/2013 8:23 PM, K Randolph wrote:

In closing, what do you want to do with your study of Biblical Hebrew?

If you want to make it part of a broader study of linguistics, then a

study of cognate languages is not only preferable, but needed. But if

you merely want to maximize your understanding of Hebrew itself and of

the Tanakh, then a study of cognate languages will actually hurt.

That's not my experience at all. I've been doing Latin and Greek
(cognate languages) simultaneously since 1977. It hasn't hurt me at all,
and in fact, has been quite helpful. Learning Aramaic was far easier
since I already had some Hebrew under my belt. In the early stages of
learning, if you do two languages at the same time, it can occasionally
be confusing, but rarely (again in my experience) due to the cognate
nature of the languages.


--
N.E. Barry Hofstetter
Semper melius Latine sonat
The American Academy
http://www.theamericanacademy.net
The North American Reformed Seminary
http://www.tnars.net
Bible Translation Magazine
http://www.bible-translation.net

http://my.opera.com/barryhofstetter/blog
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