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b-hebrew - Re: [b-hebrew] Lexemes and meanings

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  • From: K Randolph <kwrandolph AT gmail.com>
  • To: John Leake <jesleake AT yahoo.co.uk>
  • Cc: B-Hebrew <b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] Lexemes and meanings
  • Date: Tue, 7 May 2013 21:22:56 -0700

John:

On Tue, May 7, 2013 at 1:24 AM, John Leake <jesleake AT yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
But can’t you see that the same action can apply to many different contexts?

For example, “to swing” can refer to a dance movement, an attempt to strike a ball, leading an orchestra or band, children playing on a playground construction, regulating the speed of a clock with a pendulum, and so forth, yet they all share the same action, namely limited circular movement around an arc. I see the action. But are you all blinded by the different contexts?

Oh, Karl, this is a bit of a 'limpets' vs 'splitters' argument, isn't it?

What is that? Is this some sort of slang of which I have never heard before?
 
Are you sure you're not a little blinded by the 'word'? Now, 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.

As an American using the American version of English, this use of the word “swing” was always recognized as being somewhat poetic, but has almost totally dropped out of use as hanging as a form of execution has almost totally be replace by other forms of execution. However, in American English, hanging as a form of execution is still known. 

For me, the difference 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.

I have made the comment that it appears to me that I use the word “context” more than all the other members of this list put together. But in order for accurate understanding of context, one needs accurate understanding of each word and the semantic range that it can fill. Both are needed. In balance.

Where this controversy has arisen is that I found, in practice of every language that I studied, that when one looks at action represented by a lexeme, that there is usually only one action involved. Sometimes that action can be applied to only a very narrow set of contexts, sometimes to many, sometimes only physical action, other times physically and figuratively, but there’s still a commonality of action involved.

A complicating factor for Biblical Hebrew is that sometimes physical objects are named to represent actions. For example, when Exodus says that God led Israel out of Egypt with “an upraised arm”, that didn’t mean that the ancient Israelites viewed God as a super human, with a physical body just like a human, rather it referred to the action of fighting. The ten plagues were against the Egyptian gods, where YHWH showed he was superior to all of them.

However since 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 (not that we have to!).

Platonism and neo-Platonism are thought systems based on form, not function. Because I think functionally, I reject Platonism in all its forms.
 
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 (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).

Whenever questions like this come up, I ask if there are DSS examples to check against, as the LXX is a translation, with all the limitations that that involves, including sometimes out and out wrong. In this case, is this already an example of Kethiv vs. Qere, or was there a textual variant behind the difference in translation? One thing to consider, if LW followed by an object is meant, it almost always (if not always) follows the verb, whereas if L) is meant to effect the action of the verb, it always precedes the verb. Where is it found in this verse?

Haven’t you been reading what I write, namely that I don’t count words that have different etymologies but have become homonyms, when I make my claim? 

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 (נלחם vs pi. לחם)

The Arabic example went right past me, as I know nothing of the Arabic language itself, therefore could not intelligently discuss your example. You might as well have spoken in Zulu.

I have never argued that because two words are similar, or even homographs or homonyms, that their forms indicate that they are related. I have never advocated for that just because two words look similar to each other or to a root, that that’s proof that they are etymologically related (etymological error). I have never argued that even where an etymological connection can be shown, that the root and its derivatives have exactly the same meaning. I have always recognized that there are homonyms, or in Biblical Hebrew homographs (e.g. there are four distinct actions behind the written word )X in Biblical Hebrew, and I list them. I doubt they were all pronounced the same). But, in analyzing an unknown context in which is found a word whose definition is found by its uses in other contexts, the default methodology should use the definition as recognized from other contexts first, unless there’s good evidence that a different action is involved. A sloppy lexicography can lead to misunderstanding of the whole context, and to individual words within the context.

Yet when I mention that my experience in all the languages I studied that I find a common action behind words that are used in multiple contexts, I find myself accused of everything that I have repeatedly argued against in the paragraph above.

  John Leake

Karl W. Randolph. 




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