Fascinating querry.
Since you would be with these students only a month, instead of dicussing
with them the formal stems, weak roots and so forth I would spend maximum
efforts in reading as many biblical texts as possible during this period.
Only if specific questions arise which require formal grammatical analysis,
would I raise these specific subjects.
Let us remember that the author of the Joseph stories did not know of the
existence of the Piel, nor was Yirmiyahu's teacher aware of the existence of a
category of weak medial letters in roots - although in both cases they used
them all the time!
It would be gratifying to hear of your experiences at the end of the teaching
period there.
Uri Hurwitz Great Neck, NY
Active/visual ways to teach stems and conjugations
Phil King phil_king at sil.org
Mon Oct 25 19:09:07 EDT 2010
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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.
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