Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] Question for Rolf on the JW outlook on the Hebrew
Date: Sat, 24 Mar 2007 19:41:26 +0000
On 24/03/2007 08:55, Rolf Furuli wrote:
... clauses which are so restricted that we, with a good measure of
certainty, can say that a certain property is a semantic part of the verb
form itself and is not caused by the context, are very few. ...
Thank you for clarifying this statement, with which I can agree if we
use your definition of "semantic". So we have very few properties which
we know to be semantic. But for a language to be useful for
communication it must have quite a lot of properties which are semantic;
but in the case of biblical Hebrew and using your definitions, we cannot
know that they are semantic. It is a simple matter of probability,
surely, that a good proportion of the properties which have been alleged
to be semantic, but which cannot be proved to be semantic, are in fact
semantic although (in the absence of mother tongue speakers) not
provably so. The implication of this is that it is very dangerous to
slide from "not provably semantic" to "not semantic". So, it seems to me
that you need to take more care to avoid saying that some property is
not semantic but a matter of linguistic convention, unless you have
actually proved that it is not semantic.
I wonder, would you also agree with the opposite of your statement, that
clauses of which we can say with a good measure of certainty that a
certain property is NOT semantic are very few?