Biblical Hebrew Forum

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

I'm glad we are broadly in agreement, Karl. As for the following:

While apparent literary style varied between those two dates, there’s little evidence of language change.

Well, I'm not convinced, but then I've not researched it. As a gut feeling I think it unlikely that eight hundred years of often violent political and social change would leave no trace on the language bar style. But it's hard to see phonetic changes through our nicely normalized Massoritic text, and as for semantic change... Anyway, I've never looked at the Hebrew in that detail.

John Leake

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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 29 Apr 2013, at 03:19, K Randolph <kwrandolph AT gmail.com> wrote:

John:

On Sun, Apr 28, 2013 at 8:20 AM, John Leake <jesleake AT yahoo.co.uk> wrote:

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.

Biblical Hebrew between Moses to the Babylonian Exile was spoken about 800 years. We don’t know if older texts were updated to the “modern” Hebrew of Moses’ time when Moses compiled Genesis. While apparent literary style varied between those two dates, there’s little evidence of language change.

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

That is a big problem. Failing to have a native speaker, the next best thing to have is a large body of texts outside of the text that is being studied. Unfortunately, we don’t have that for Biblical Hebrew either.

There’s evidence that some of the more obscure terms were forgotten as early as the LXX. So that leaves only the bruised reed of cognate languages for those terms.

John Leake

Open University

Karl W. Randolph.