Dave: On Mon, Mar 12, 2012 at 8:26 PM, Dave Washburn <[email protected]>wrote:
> Thanks. It's a principle that I've tried to preach for a long time, and > it's the reason why I do my very best to avoid poetic texts when trying to > sort out Hebrew syntax. Of course, it reduces my corpus for syntactic study > of biblical Hebrew by more than half, but everything in life is a > trade-off! > > But even in poetry, Biblical Hebrew language still follows certain rules—each phrase has a subject, either explicit or implicit from an earlier phrase; verb either explicit or implicit from an earlier phrase which agrees in number and gender with the subject; and object where applicable. Adjectives and adverbs agree in gender and number with the appropriate nouns and verbs. It seems as if the Masoretic points are more often wrong in poetry than in prose. Where poetry most differs from prose is in word order—the word order in poetry is often in rhythms and patterns while in prose the word order tends to follow order of importance of what is being said. Karl W. Randolph. _______________________________________________ b-hebrew mailing list [email protected] http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/b-hebrew
