Karl,
Three things: (1) Part of the reason you're having such a hard time understanding what other people are saying, and why no one seems to agree with you, is that you're not reading very carefully what other people are writing, or really attempting to understand what they are trying to communicate. An excellent example of that is our recent interchange. Note: I said, "With regard to the 'strike' in baseball example, you have several problems. First, the use of 'strike' in the sense of miss, is used outside of baseball as well. People 'strike out' in love, in dating, in making sales calls, in attempts at making persuasive arguments, etc." But I followed that up immediately, anticipating what I knew you were going to say, by also noting, "If you come back at me and say that 'strike out' is, as you refer to it, a 'complex lexeme,' I would point out that the same 'complex lexeme' refers as well to people 'striking out' against other people, which goes back to the more traditional concept of 'hit.'" So I had already taken your "complex lexeme" argument into account. But, incredibly, you simply ignored the latter part of that paragraph and said, "Sorry, but this example is invalid. Invalid because here you reference a compound lexeme, one where two or more words in combination give a third meaning that neither word has apart from the other." Just as incredibly, you go on to say, "You need to consider contexts, is it being used as a complex lexeme, or as simple lexemes? Is it a metaphorical reference to a compound lexeme as used in a very narrow context, or general uses of the terms as they are used elsewhere? Your argument fails." But I had already referred to what you call a "complex lexeme," noting that the same "complex lexeme" has two different meanings in two different contexts. If you want people to follow your arguments, you've got to pay more careful attention what they write. (2) Second, your reply to my remarks about the use of the term strike in baseball is simply incredible. If you live in the U.S., and don't know a single person who watches baseball, no one who watches regulary, and no one who brings it up in casual conversation, then I almost feel like responding, do you live on a commune or something? You must be living a very narrowly circumscribed world. You don't have any acquaintances who watch baseball. You haven't read an English translation of the Bible in decades. And you regularly denigrate the work of very fine lexicographers who have created the major lexicons of the Hebrew Bible over the last hundred years. In essence, you have cut yourself off from scholarly work. It simply becomes harder and harder to take you seriously. (3) Finally, you say, "Here you confuse statistical frequency with mainstream use or meaning. We have discussed this fallacy also in Biblical Hebrew grammar, where in the case of the Wayyiqtol, the vast majority of uses, possibly over 90%, are in narrative of past events, therefore the error is made that the Wayyiqtol is a conjugation for past tense. But when one takes into account that the narrative past tense is only one of the contexts where the Wayyiqtol is found, and the other contexts indicate a different meaning to the Wayyiqtol conjugation, a meaning that also fits the narrative past tense, indicates that we need to consider all contexts, not just the one that has the statistical greatest frequency. "Likewise, just because “strike” may be used multiples of times in one game in the narrow confines of baseball does not make its use normative and not idiosyncratic. But unlike the Wayyiqtol above, the uses of “strike” in all its other contexts does not predict its use in baseball. Therefore its use in baseball is idiosyncratic." There are so many problems here that is hard to know where to begin. But here goes: First, statistical frequency IS an indication of mainstream usage or meaning. If the grand majority of the people who are either saying or hearing the word "strike" used everyday understand it to mean "miss" then that IS a mainstream use and meaning. To believe otherwise is just to be in a state of denial. Second, your wayyiqtol example does not help your case. Because, I would argue (and I realize I might raise the hackles of some people on the list) wayyiqtol in narrative does, in fact, mean past tense. Now I would not argue that past tense is an inherent meaning of wayyiqtol, nor would I argue that there aren't indeed a number of places where wayyiqtol means something besides past tense. Wayyiqtol may have originally had a very different significance than what it means in narrative. Nevertheless, I would maintain that, regardless of what it meant originally, or what it means elsewhere, in narrative, its meaning is indeed simple past tense. And you cannot simply say that this is an idiosyncratic usage. Indeed, by your own admission, this usage probably accounts for 90%+ usage in the Hebrew Bible. That IS mainstream Blessings, Jerry Jerry Shepherd Taylor Seminary Edmonton, Alberta [email protected]
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