On 12/02/2004 15:36, Karl Randolph wrote:
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>Is this the way ancient Hebrews thought? Or are we imposing our modern way
of thinking on the ancient Hebrews?
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We can't know exactly how the ancient Hebrews thought. But we can study how various present-day peoples think, including those who have had little exposure to western culture, and some whose general worldview is probably quite similar to that of the ancient Hebrews. Some people do study such things in depth, for example Ron Moe of SIL who is working on lexicography of Bantu languages (see some more about this at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/lexicographylist/). It is reasonable to suppose (at least on the assumption that there has been no fundamental and worlwide change in human nature over the last 3000 years or so) that how the ancient Hebrews thought, on most semantic issues (leaving aside for the moment anything specifically religious), is in general terms within the range of ways which different contemporary peoples think.
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>2) Where a lexeme has more than one meaning, there is usually a discernible
connection, for example, Birne in German means both light bulb and pear, the
connection being that the early light bulbs had a pear like shape.
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You are in danger here of the etymological fallacy because you are losing sight of language change. Suppose that 100 years in the future light bulbs are no longer even vaguely pear-shaped, and for some reason I cannot fathom the German word Birne is no longer used for the fruit, but only for light bulbs. Only specialists would understand the link between the word Birne and its original meaning as a fruit.
For a real example of this kind of thing, consider the word "cab" = "taxi" (is this only British usage?) This originally was a word for a small horse-drawn carriage, short for "cabriolet" I think, then used for "hansom cab" = horse-drawn taxi, and then applied to motor taxis. But if you ask an average cabbie (cab driver) where the word came from, they probably wouldn't have a clue that it was originally a horse-drawn carriage.
Similarly, if we consider how the ancient Hebrews might have thought, we can be sure that they didn't have a grasp of the principles of modern etymology, and so would not have made certain links which now seem obvious to us. And in fact we can tell some of the links which they did make from the explanations given for many names in the Hebrew Bible, a number of which don't make much sense by the principles of modern linguistics, but as folk etymologies they do tell us quite a lot about how the Hebrews thought about words.
>3) Where a lexeme has a narrow and specific meaning, it often is either
partially or wholly a subset of another lexeme. Therefore, one way to learn a
lexeme is to compare it to its synonyms.
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I would agree that comparison with synonyms is useful, especially when used in poetic parallelism. But I would be careful about this subset principle, which is by no means universal.
>4) Lexeme meanings are best recognized by the action they refer to, not the
form. This is especially true of ancient Hebrew.
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I wonder if this is really more true of Hebrew than of other languages. I see your 'OP example below, but I suspect that is more a matter of a pre-scientific viewpoint which did not classify things according to Aristotelean categories, which indeed do tend to be form-based not function-based.
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>In reference to category 4) above, ancient Hebrew seems to categorize
according to action or function, not according to form or appearance. For
example, (WP or (WP KNP is usually translated as “bird”, but that is not
accurate. It actually refers to flying creatures where the action is the
deciding factor, hence a bat or flying insect is (WP while an ostrich or penguin
is not. (This is also an example of 1) above—there is no equivalency for this
term in English.) Similarly, a XBL rope would be defined by its ability to bind
things together, not its shape.
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>So what do youall think?
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>Karl W. Randolph.
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A few quick responses above.
--
Peter Kirk
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