Hi Karl,
I know you are trying hard Karl, but your arguments amount to no more than special pleading, based on your own idiosyncratic use of terms. You say, "This whole section is invalidated because you didn’t take into account the differences between a complex lexeme, as I have repeatedly defined it to try to make sure of understandable communication, and simple lexemes in context." And that's where you engage in special pleading. You refer to a complex lexeme, "as I have repeatedly defined it." But you simply can't do that. You can't call one instance a complex lexeme and refuse to call another instance of the exact same phrase a complex lexeme as well. And you can't beg the question by referring to "an idiosyncratice use of the word 'strike' that is unique to the game of baseball." It may have been idiosyncratic at one time; it is no longer, it is a tremendously popular, and no longer unique to baseball. You say, "How is “disagree” the same as “denigrate” other than to say I think so-and-so’s dictionary is faulty because I think his methodology is faulty? And then to give the reasons? I view that as professional disagreement, not as personal attacks." Of course, the problem you have here is that you think everyone's methodology is faulty except for your own, which you employ in your unpublished dictionary. That can hardly be referred to as a "professional disagreement." You remind me of the soldier whose mother proudly bragged to her friend, "Every single soldier in that military parade was out of step except for my son." As far as the whole wayyiqtol thing there are two things I need to note. First, this is again one other example of how you are either are reading too fast, or choosing to ignore what the person with whom you are dialoguing has said. I'll repeat it again, but I'll put in all capitals this time since you seem to be hard of reading: I said, explicitly, "I would not argue that past tense is an inherent meaning of wayyiqtol." And yet, when you reply, you say, " Just because the form is used in past tense narrative does not mean that the form itself is an indicator of past tense." Yes, Karl, I already said that. How did you miss it? But what I then went on to argue is that even though wayyiqtol does not inherently mean past tense, it came to be so used in narrative. And thus for the vast majority of cases when wayyiqtol occurs in narrative, it means past tense. If I had a class of Hebrew students, and I gave them an exam in which I gave them 100 wayyiqtols, taken representatively and proportionately from the different genres of the Hebrew Bible, and they translated every single wayyiqtol as a past tense, they would all score somewhere between 90 and 100 on the exam, and my dean would get upset with me for giving out too many "A"s in my class. Indeed, I do tell my Hebrew students that in narrative, wayyiqtol, for all practical purposes, means past tense. And I tell them that weqatal, for the most part, gets its tense or aspect from the leading verb, whether that verb is what has been traditionally called perfect, imperfect, or imperative. Karl, you can't call this "cherry picking or biased sample." Finally, Karl, no one on this list, and certainly not I, is trying to say that we "can assign meanings to Hebrew terms irregardless of how those terms are used in other contexts." The problem is that you are the one who refuses to recognize that what a word means in a particular context is, in fact, a valid meaning for that word. And when millions of people understand that usage to be a meaning for that word, it is simply not fair to cavalierly dismiss that meaning as idiosyncratic. Blessings, Jerry Jerry Shepherd Taylor Seminary Edmonton, Alberta [email protected]
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