Will: 2011/10/3 Will Parsons <[email protected]>
> Karl, > > On Mon, 3 Oct 2011 12:36:39 -0700, K Randolph <[email protected]> > wrote: > > Randall: > > > > … Or for me, the > > reason I got into Hebrew on a daily basis was because I had trouble > > understanding Elizabethan English as used in the KJV. Similarly, a native > > speaker of modern Israeli Hebrew will think he understands Biblical > Hebrew, > > but because of the changes in vocabulary meanings and grammatical > structure, > > how often will he misunderstand the text? > > This is a good point, but the problem can be overcome by proper study. > Shakespeare's language, although technically Modern English, is different > enough from contemporary English that the modern English reader will need > notes to understand numerous differences of vocabulary, meanings, &c. (And > of course for Chaucer one will need *lots* of notes to understand them.) > While notes work pretty well for languages fairly well known and understood as Elizabethan English, what sort of notes should be written for a language not as well known as Biblical Hebrew for the benefit of modern Hebrew readers? Further, how extensive would those notes have to be, seeing as grammatical meanings behind the forms have changed significantly. Would there have to be extensive notes for each verse? And how much admission that there is still controversy concerning some of the meanings behind the forms? > > > When we don’t even know how Biblical Hebrew was pronounced, other than > that > > the Masoretic points coded for Tiberian Hebrew which was different from > > Biblical Hebrew, how can it credibly be claimed that by using modern > > pronunciation of Tiberian points we are thereby teaching Biblical Hebrew? > > He’s whistling Dixie. > > I think it can be credibly so claimed. Compare the situation of the > classical > languages. In the case of Latin and (Classical) Greek, we think we know > pretty well (mostly) how Cicero pronounced Latin and how Plato pronounced > Greek, and nowadays when Latin and Greek are taught, some approximation of > that reconstructed pronunciation is taught. (I'm not in academia, so I > can't > say for certain, but my impression is that there is more of an effort on > the > part of some instructors to aim for a pronunciation closer to the > reconstructed original that previously was the case.) However, using these > "restored" pronuncations is comparatively recent, and for centuries both > Latin > and Greek were taught using pronunciations that diverged widely from > anything > an ancient Greek or Roman would have spoken. (The traditional English > pronunciation of Latin survives in the realms of law and > botanical/zoological > nomenclature.) But this doesn't mean that classical Latin and Greek > weren't > being taught - indeed they were, and those that studied Latin and Greek in > those days frequently attained a level of expertise that would be > exceptional > to-day. > The situation for Latin and Greek are different for two reasons: 1) both languages have extensive surviving literature from both their times and 2) both languages continued to be spoken as native languages even as they changed, either directly as in the case with Greek, and indirectly by several offshoots in the case of Latin. Biblical Hebrew, on the other hand, ceased to be spoken as a native tongue over 2000 years ago, has very little literature in Hebrew outside the Tanakh that survived from when it was spoken natively, showed fairly quick changes after it ceased to be a natively spoken language consistent with non-native speakers applying grammar, pronunciation and even words taken from their native languages (Aramaic, Greek, etc.) to their understanding of Hebrew. > > Now the situation of Hebrew is somewhat different from that of Greek or > Latin. > First, what is "classical" Hebrew anyway? The Hebrew text of the Bible was > composed over a considerable period of time, during which Hebrew no doubt > underwent many changes of pronunciation and vocabulary. I think I remember > reading (a *long* time ago) in some technical article that the language of > Jeremiah was considered "classical Hebrew". So, for the present, if we > take > the language of Jeremiah the language that one should aim for, how was it > pronounced? I'm not up on what might be the current state of thought on > Hebrew historical linguistics, but I doubt that the level of confidence in > a > reconstructed pronunciation of Hebrew of Jeremiah's time would be up to the > level of confidence in a reconstructed pronunciation of classical Greek or > Latin. And even if it were, it would not be represented directly in the > Hebrew text that the learner has before him, which consists of a basically > consonantal script with a superimposed system of vowels representing a > pronunciation of more than a millennium later. > I tend to think of the period from Solomon to Isaiah as the apex of classical Hebrew, making Jeremiah late classical, Ezekiel late native speaker, possibly the last native speaker writer being Daniel who wrote half his book in Aramaic expecting his readers to know Aramaic. The post Exile writers being early non-native users of Hebrew, with varying expertise in Hebrew as a second language, e.g. Nehemiah not knowing Hebrew as well as his contemporary Ezra. As far as pronunciation, when we look at poetry, if we read it as each letter representing a syllable consisting of a consonant followed by a vowel, the text then has a meter, a rhythm, that it lacks when read with modern pronunciation. However, the modern pronunciation or a reconstruction of Tiberian pronunciation based largely on Yemenite pronunciation, are very similar and the most widely known, therefore any teaching should teach that. > > -- > Will Parsons > Karl W. Randolph. _______________________________________________ b-hebrew mailing list [email protected] http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/b-hebrew
