b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org
Subject: Biblical Hebrew Forum
List archive
- From: John Leake <jesleake AT yahoo.co.uk>
- To: B-Hebrew <b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org>
- Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] Lexemes and meanings
- Date: Tue, 7 May 2013 09:51:37 +0100
A resubmission as my original seems to have gone astray (and had a couple of typos and spell-check mutations in it, a hazard if writing on an iPhone)
Oh, Karl, this is a bit of a 'lumpers' vs 'splitters' argument, isn't it? Are you sure you're not a little blinded by the 'word'? Now, 'to swing'. Sure, 'to swing' in the sense of 'to be hanged' originally meant 'swing to and fro (on the end of a rope)', a graphic idea that this use of 'to swing' admittedly never quite loses. But the main idea of this use is surely 'be hanged' once it becomes a common usage. For me, the meaning is in the overall significance of the word. Full understanding of what the speaker meant by the short sentence 'He swung' is impossible without context. Is the speaker saying the verbal subject died? Were they in a playground? 'He' can't be an object, so it's obviously not a cricket ball moving in a curve. Did he mean he slept around? The speaker doesn't intend by his words to indicate that the subject moved in a particular way, but to communicate playing, dying, sleeping round. Give a context and the full significance becomes clear and the ambiguity vanishes. However it is obvious that for you the 'action' behind the word is something like a Platonic form of the word, so we are not likely to agree (is there any that we have to, as long as we understand where we are coming from and not talking at cross purposes?). We can probably agree that the simple action of 'moving through an arc' (and the related 'pivot about an axis') does indeed historically connect the various uses and that they may well be connected in the mind of the speaker by it (if he thought about it). Perhaps that's even true of to swing in a sexual sense, or to swing from one opinion to another, though there's no actual swinging movement (they are, I suppose, metaphors in origin). But a Hebrew speaker of the third century BC might have said the same about יעד לו את האשה versus יעד את העם באהל. (I say third century as the LXX gives us the significance of Ex 21:8 at that point in time).
Haven't you read _my_ argument, Karl? You'll note I put this in as an aside, but I'm not writing wholly in response to your position but more broadly: the tendency of language towards disambiguation in context isn't dependent on etymology but on the fact that two words are homophones (or homographs in written language). Anyway, speakers are not usually aware of the etymology of words and they often create their own semantic links between etymologically unrelated but phonetically similar words, as I tried to show a week or so back with Arabic malHama (= both Heb. מלחמה and 'butchers shop'). It's due to this tendency to disambiguation in context that verbs based on originally differing roots typically use different binyanim in Hebrew (e.g. נלחם vs piel לחם) John Leake ---------------------------------- ان صاحب حياة هانئة لا يدونها انما يحياها He who has a comfortable life doesn't write about it - he lives it ----------------------------------
|
-
Re: [b-hebrew] Lexemes and meanings
, (continued)
- Re: [b-hebrew] Lexemes and meanings, K Randolph, 05/06/2013
-
Re: [b-hebrew] Lexemes and meanings,
Barry H., 05/06/2013
- Re: [b-hebrew] Lexemes and meanings, David Kolinsky, 05/06/2013
- Re: [b-hebrew] Lexemes and meanings, Barry H., 05/06/2013
- Re: [b-hebrew] Lexemes and meanings, Isaac Fried, 05/06/2013
- Re: [b-hebrew] Lexemes and meanings, John Leake, 05/06/2013
-
Re: [b-hebrew] Lexemes and meanings,
K Randolph, 05/06/2013
- Re: [b-hebrew] Lexemes and meanings, John Leake, 05/07/2013
- Re: [b-hebrew] Lexemes and meanings, K Randolph, 05/08/2013
- Re: [b-hebrew] Lexemes and meanings, John Leake, 05/07/2013
- Re: [b-hebrew] Lexemes and meanings, K Randolph, 05/08/2013
- Re: [b-hebrew] Lexemes and meanings, John Leake, 05/08/2013
-
Re: [b-hebrew] Lexemes and meanings,
K Randolph, 05/08/2013
- Re: [b-hebrew] Lexemes and meanings, Jerry Shepherd, 05/09/2013
- Re: [b-hebrew] Lexemes and meanings, K Randolph, 05/09/2013
- Re: [b-hebrew] Lexemes and meanings, Jerry Shepherd, 05/10/2013
- Re: [b-hebrew] Lexemes and meanings, K Randolph, 05/10/2013
Archive powered by MHonArc 2.6.24.