Celsus

A nice little foray into the arbitrary nature of translations <a href="http://iidb.org/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic&f=51&t=000854" target="_blank">over here</a> got me thinking about a similar problem.

Now this is a conservative Christian publication, and yet it basically says to me, "Any certainty you had about the Old Testament, well... throw it out." Can anyone make more sense of this than me? This is extremely frustrating, because it was exactly these problems in NT translation (reading everyone's variants) that made me give up on NT stuff. Now it looks like I'll have to do the same with the OT, until I learn Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek. (I do know the Greek alphabet now though, and am working on the Hebrew)

Vorkosigan

Chinese is in some ways similar, although it is SVO. And it is almost always clear from context what the speaker or writer intends, at least as far as the cupola is concerned. Tense should be clear as well -- time is often elided in Chinese too. So, while it sounds bad, it isn't if you know what you are doing. Remember, the Bible scholar has all those centuries of rabbinical commentaries to fall back on in order to get the meaning, and other resources as well.

Vorkosigan

Evangelion

Remember also, that Hebrew itself has changed considerably.

Goodness knows how they managed to cope without any vowels and tenses! <img src="confused.gif" border="0">

[ December 22, 2002: Message edited by: Evangelion ]</p>

lpetrich

Hebrew does have vowels, but they are often not written, and they can often be inferred from context.

Also, one can distinguish past, present, and future by adding appropriate adverbs of time.

Evangelion

lpetrich -

Traditionally, however, the vowels were virtually non-existent. It wasn't until the Masorites added vowel points that life became easier.

True. But it is nowhere near as explicit as English, and without a clear set of tenses, the incredible flexibility of ancient Hebrew can lead to some confusion.

Take the word ehyeh, for instance.

Celsus

Thanks Vork,

The Chinese analogy made things a lot clearer. However, another question (to anyone who might know): Is Semitic syntax actually similar to Chinese syntax?

Joel

emotional

Take a Gesenius grammar, it'll show you what it's all about. In summary:

Biblical Hebrew does not strictly have tenses, it has aspects and moods: perfect, imperfect, jussive, energetic and a few more obscure ones. Of course, tenses spring out of the aspects, so that the perfect has come to denote chiefly the past, and the imperfect mainly the present and future. It's still so in Arabic: perfect form for the past, imperfect for present and future.

An additional complication is the consecutive-waw: the waw at the beginning of the verb that inverts its meaning, so that the perfect denotes future, and the imperfect denotes past.

Perfect: halakh "he went / has gone / will have gone"

Imperfect: yelekh "he goes / is going / will go / has been going"

Perfect inverted: w'halakh "he will go"

Imperfect inverted: wayyelekh "he went"

I'll not go into the jussive and energetic forms, they only complicate matters. Arabic does not have a consecutive-waw usage, but it does have a negative particle, lam, which turns an imperfect form into a denoter of the past. For example yaktubu "he writes / will write", but lam yaktub "he did not write".

Modern Hebrew has changed things entirely. Instead of aspect, the verb-system is neatly organised in a three-tense system: past (the former perfect), present (the present participle) and future (the former imperfect). And the consecutive-waw is no longer in use.

So generally, Biblical Hebrew tense is determined by both form and context. Perfect generally means past, imperfect generally means present or future, and the inverse if a waw precedes them.

emotional

No. Semitic syntax is morphological, in contrast to Chinese, which depends wholly on word-order. Hebrew still retains the accusative case, and Arabic has all three cases:

Nominative: dhahaba l-'insaanu: the man went

Accusative: ra'aitu l-'insaana: I saw the man

Genitive or Prepositional: haadha kitaabu l-'insaani: this is the man's book

Chinese has no cases, nor any other syntactical morphemes at that.

Sauron

The comment about tense does not apply to Arabic, and I'm guessing that it wouldn't apply to any proto-Arabic dialects. There is a concept of tense, but only two: past and present. Future is created through a verbal mechanism.

The nominal sentence is fairly safe from misunderstanding, I would think. The noun can only be complemented by something acting as an adjective, or verbal adjective (i.e., "the book is big" or "the cup is broken"). I wouldn't expect confusion unless multiple nouns or adjectives were introduced, and then it becomes a question of attaching which adjective to which noun. That's usually sorted out by context, gender markers, or by additional vowelling which clarifies things.

If I wanted to poke a hole in a biblical reading of Hebrew, I would think that the missing short vowels would provide more room for doubt than the nominal sentence does.

Vorkosigan

No, but that's not really might point. Mainly, even with 'important' syntactical clues missing, you can still figure out what things mean from the context, with the proper training.