Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Dave Washburn <davidlwashburn AT gmail.com>]

>A second point that I’ve noticed is that when one looks at a term that appears to have multiple meanings, when one looks at the underlying >action, what one finds is the same action applied to different contexts.

I'd be interested to see more development of this idea, because I've noticed just the opposite: words mean what they mean because a society chooses to use them that way. An English examples is "strike", which mean "hit" in bowling but "miss" in baseball.

>A third point, one must differentiate between simple lexemes and complex lexemes. A complex lexeme is where two or more words are >combined to give a different meaning than what each single word has: e.g. “to fish out” has a different meaning than “to fish”.

I think you're describing an idiom with this example. I'm not sure there's a difference between an idiomatic usage and a "complex lexeme," but there it is.

On Sat, May 4, 2013 at 7:13 AM, K Randolph <kwrandolph AT gmail.com> wrote:

Nir:

What you give are reasons I claim that Mishnaic Hebrew is a different language from Biblical Hebrew, a cognate language, and should be studied as such.

A second point that I’ve noticed is that when one looks at a term that appears to have multiple meanings, when one looks at the underlying action, what one finds is the same action applied to different contexts.

A third point, one must differentiate between simple lexemes and complex lexemes. A complex lexeme is where two or more words are combined to give a different meaning than what each single word has: e.g. “to fish out” has a different meaning than “to fish”.

So when one looks at a snapshot of a language, i.e. the use of a language at one point in time, there are very few exceptions, even in modern languages, that each lexeme has one unique meaning.

Karl W. Randolph.

On Fri, May 3, 2013 at 8:01 AM, Nir cohen - Prof. Mat. <nir AT ccet.ufrn.br> wrote:

karl,

>>There’s a major point of disagreement right there—a word can have multiple
translations because of the differences from one language to another. but
within its own milieu, it has one meaning.

here i must side with david. there are three types of phenomena: change
of the word morphology, change of the word semantics, and even bifurcation:
one word is endowed with two different meanings. do you really want to claim
that none of these occur?

nir cohen

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