kwrandolph wrote:In Biblical Hebrew, participles are nouns. They are either actors, or gerunds which are nouns. Participles are declined as nouns because they’re nouns.
Participles are
verbal adjectives. The infinitive construct is the
verbal noun. And participles have a feature that other adjectives do not... in that they can take the definite article with the sense of the relative pronoun.
כָּל־הָעֹשֶׂה מְלָאכָה בְּיוֹם הַשַּׁבָּת מוֹת יוּמָת׃
Everyone who does work on the Sabbath day will surely be put to death.
אַשְׁרֵי תְמִימֵי־דָרֶךְ הַהֹלְכִים בְּתוֹרַת יְהוָה׃
Blessed are those whose way is blameless, who walk in the law of the Lord.
וְהִנֵּה עֵינֵיכֶם רֹאוֹת וְעֵינֵי אָחִי בִנְיָמִין כִּי־פִי הַמְדַבֵּר אֲלֵיכֶם׃
Behold, your eyes see, and the eyes of my brother Benjamin, that my [own] mouth [is] [the one] which is speaking to you.
This sense is most often, but not always, created when there is discord in definiteness between the referent ("subject") and the participle.
Thus also, the phrase
הַפּוֹדֵ֫נוּ מִיַּד מְלָכִים "[the one] who redeems us from the hand of kings" from within the Jewish prayer service. It seems that there is but one biblical example that has an article attached with a personal suffix: Job 40.19, in which we see
הָעֹשׂוֹ "[the one] who made him." As I said, it's a rare construction, and the way that you used
הַמַּגֵּפַת is completely incorrect without any justifiable defense.
Whereas the participle is a verbal adjective, it shares the function of substantivalization that all adjectives can perform. That is, just as
צַדִּיק can mean "righteous" or "a righteous person," so a participle can take on the quality of a noun. That's a standard feature of adjectives.
kwrandolph wrote:Then you’ll have to say that האשמרת in Judges 7:19 is also incorrect.
I don't have to say that at all. There are some nouns that take an absolute form like this that resembles the construct.
אַשְׁמֹ֫רֶת happens to be one of them (which could also appear as
אַשְׁמֻרָה). You could also call to mind
תִּפְאֶ֫רֶת in the absolute state, which also appears as
תִּפְאָרָה. These forms can be ambiguous because there is a pattern that has absolutes that look like constructs (such as
מִשְׁמֶ֫רֶת). Your objection on the case is without merit, since
הָאַשְׁמֹ֫רֶת is as acceptable as are
הַמִּשְׁמֶ֫רֶת and
הַתִּפְאֶ֫רֶת (which are both anticipated and witnessed in the text).
kwrandolph wrote:I spent a few minutes to see if I could find any examples of a definite article on a noun in construct, and found what looks like one before I even got out of the Alephs. And I checked fewer than half the possibilities to get to this point. I also found that it’s far rarer than I expected.
Far rarer? It doesn't happen.
kwrandolph wrote:Constructive criticism identifies a problem, explains why it is is a problem, then suggests a solution.
But when the criticism is not valid, it's a problem. We should not be making criticisms for the sake of being critical. The criticism should be well-placed and as accurate as we can expect from one another as we attempt to build one another up rather than just offer opposition.
kwrandolph wrote:Let’s look at something else in your paragraph. In it, you used the verb שאר to talk about remaining in your house (problem). I don’t know it’s modern meaning, but in Biblical Hebrew it had the meaning of something left over, remaining, like leftovers from a meal. The way it comes out is “I was leftovers in my house” (why it’s a problem). I don’t know of any Biblical Hebrew word corresponding to the English idea of to remain, stay, so where in English we’d say “I stayed (remained) in my house for a month” the way it comes out in Biblical Hebrew is “I settled ישב in my house one month.” (solution).
נִשְׁאַר means "remained," as in "didn't leave" or "wasn't taken." Look at Nehemiah, which you read the other day. It very clearly uses this verb of those who were living in Jerusalem when the prophet came back to inspect the city. They "remained" there while the rest of the people were carried off to Babylon.
יָשַׁב can just as easily mean "I sat" as it does "I dwelt" (Gen 18.1 comes to mind, where Abraham was
יֹשֵׁב sitting at the entrance to his tent when the angels came to pay him a visit). Your objections to these things are really off.
kwrandolph wrote:Let’s face it, none of us, myself included, will ever get to the point where we can write flawless Biblical Hebrew. What I say is that people like you, who know modern Israeli Hebrew better than they know Biblical Hebrew, face an extra challenge that I and people like me who don’t know modern Israeli Hebrew face, namely the problem of cognate language cross-contamination. All of us have enough problems of imposing out native languages onto Biblical Hebrew when we try to write in Biblical Hebrew.
I have to reject your criticisms. I don't see them as valid, except for the use of
עִדָּן, since that is clearly not a Hebrew term. Then again, neither were
פֶּחָה or
דָּת before they became necessary to import it to match the realities of life.
Even you felt the need to create the word קרנית as an attempt to express "Conora," though neither I nor David were able to understand why you used ־ית instead of ־ה as the suffix. If you didn't want to use the
matres lectionis, fine; but, why not use ־ה so that we would read it as
קֹרֹ֫נָה? Where did that
-îṯ come from? We're honestly curious to know.
Our purpose should be to build one another up, and we can do that by providing examples from the Scriptures that might demonstrate a point of grammar that we've fudged on or to show where a word is used a certain way that justifies or negates our use. We shouldn't be overly critical in a nebulous sense that serves to make others feel overcome and overwhelmed.
Jason