...Dave, you are being unfair to Karl here.
First, why should I consider your experience the standard of judgment regarding a linguistic theory? It could very well be that, had you used a more adequate theory, you would have found said theory even more useful. We'll never know. Second, why shouldn't I argue against a theory that has so much evidence contrary to it? I thought the goal was truth, not Karl Randolph's utility. I have found it much more useful, "both for the study of modern languages as well as for the study of Biblical Hebrew," to chuck the "core meaning" notion and go with an approach that examines how people actually USE words and phrases at the synchronic level of the text I'm dealing with, and have found the practice of delving into etymology and such to try and force some "core meaning" onto a term to be, frankly, a waste of time. As always, YMMV. If you have the time and energy to pursue such things, more power to you, but be prepared to realize at some point that many of your "core definitions" are nothing more than constructs of your own making.
Another of the lessons I applied was to compare synonyms, sometimesDave, did you read past his words "The first lesson I learned is that lexemes have one core meaning"?
contrasting antonyms, to find out what lexemes mean. For example, there are
over a dozen synonyms for R)H [ra‘ah] “to look, see” in Tanakh. Some synonyms
have a broad meaning, such as “to put” in English, others much more
restricted, such as “to set up”.
One concept specific to Biblical Hebrew, look to see how lexemes are actually
used in Hebrew, not how we think (for theological or other reasons) they
should mean.
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