Steve,
Can someone please explain: What is a word-pair? Thanks.
HH: The phrase can be used in different ways, such as the absolute/ construct word pair relationship. But the way I am used to it is with refference to Hebrew parallelism, where two nouns often occur together as synonyms or a related pair. The example below mentions "silver" and "gold." "Wise" and "understanding" are a frequent collocation. There are many.
http://www.jstor.org/pss/1517342
Yours,
Harold Holmyard
From fred.putnam AT gmail.com Sat Feb 7 10:45:20 2009Return-Path: <fred.putnam AT gmail.com>
>
>
> Steve,
>> Can someone please explain: What is a word-pair? Thanks.
>>
>
> HH: The phrase can be used in different ways, such as the absolute/
> construct word pair relationship. But the way I am used to it is
> with refference to Hebrew parallelism, where two nouns often occur
> together as synonyms or a related pair. The example below mentions
> "silver" and "gold." "Wise" and "understanding" are a frequent
> collocation. There are many.
>
> http://www.jstor.org/pss/1517342
>
> Yours,
> Harold Holmyard
Classical Hebrew and other Semitic poetry is often structured
according to Lowth's "parallelism of members". That is, a poetic line
is usually a bicolon or tricolon. Each colon is a simple sentence
comprised of 2 or 3 "members", and each member in colon 1 has a
corresponding parallel in colon 2, etc (with different variations on
the theme).
Usually these parallels are synonyms or antonyms, sometimes they can
have other dynamic relationships, but often they are word-pairs. Word
pairs are not strictly synonyms or antonyms, but they are pairs of
words that just naturally go together in a culture. "Silver" and
"gold" is a good example, as is "mom" and "dad", "black" and "white",
"cat" and "dog", etc.
One interesting thing is that the order of the pair often seems to be
fixed. You never say "gold" and "silver", "dad" and "mom", or "white"
and "black". I am not sure about "dog" and "cat", does anyone say
that?. Many of these pairs cross cultures, but the order may be
reversed. Thus in later biblical books you often find "gold and
silver", which some scholars attribute to the influence of Aramaic as
a sign of late biblical Hebrew.
Peter Bekins
_______________________________________________
b-hebrew mailing list
b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org
http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/b-hebrew
Archive powered by MHonArc 2.6.24.