I’m teaching a course in Biblical Hebrew starting next week to Papua New Guinean Bible Translators and looking for some ideas to teach stems and conjugations in ways that will ‘stick’ and that don’t rely too much on English.
This will be the second course for all these folk, who have already taken a course based half on Randy Buth’s Living Biblical Hebrew, half on dramatizations of the Elijah stories. So they are able to read Hebrew writing fairly well, and have an intuitive grasp of basic grammar, but haven’t yet been exposed to much, if any, grammatical terminology. I have them for four weeks and want to try and create a bridge from their elementary intuitive understanding of the grammar and vocabulary to a stage where they can relate to lexicons, commentaries, software etc. that refer to qal, piel, hiphil,… and perfect, imperfect, imperative etc… The challenge is that these folks all come from different language groups, have limited English, and very limited linguistic background. Also I’m trying to get them to think of grammatical categories through the categories of their own vernaculars rather than through English (or Latin) categories. So I like to do things through pictures, drama and action – to help them cognitively link straight from Hebrew to their own vernaculars without getting bogged down in English in between. I’m wondering if anyone has any resources or ideas for pictures, dramas or actions that could help them conceptually grasp the different stems and the different conjugations? For example, perhaps we could act out together qatalti, niqtalti, qitalti, hiqtalti, hitqatalti (excuse the spellings) in a way that would give them a visual ‘peg’ to hang the stem concepts onto – but as this root is actually so rare in Biblical Hebrew, and I’m not totally sure what qitalti would mean – I wonder if anyone has other ideas? I’d been thinking sh-b-r might be easier – although I’m not sure how to act out ‘being broken’. Is there another good root which actually shows up in several different stems, that could be somewhat easily acted out? Or does anyone have a good set of different verbs – one for each conjugation – that could be acted out? For conjugations, I’ve seen Greek books which represent aorist as a dot and other tenses as lines or sequences of dots, but I’m not sure that really works for perfect vs. imperfect. Nor an idea someone else used for Greek with people stepping forward for future and backwards for aorist – that would suggest too much tense orientation for the Hebrew to my mind, as opposed to aspect or other interpretations of the different forms. Are there established visual ways of conceptualizing the meanings of Hebrew conjugations, that we could either draw or act out? Has anyone else ever done anything like this, or have any ideas they could share? Thanks, Phil King SIL PNG PS. I know that many lexicographers would teach different stems as entirely separate semantic entities, and so that would undermine the idea here – but in terms of using lexicons and relating to other grammar books, the root and stem approach is still going to give them some conceptual help. _______________________________________________ b-hebrew mailing list [email protected] http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/b-hebrew
