Jason Hare wrote:Since חֲבֵרַי is definite (= החברים שלי), I don't see why you would write טובים instead of הטובים.
Where do you get the idea that a masculine plural noun with a first person singular possessive suffix is necessarily definitive? However, even if definitive, the ה prefix on the following adjective is optional.
Jason Hare wrote:The word יהודית might work adverbially when it appears with the verb לדבר (as in, דבר אתנו יהודית [imperative]), but תלמידי יהודית sounds like "the disciples of Judith."
The language is mentioned as a noun in 2 Kings 18:26, 28, Isaiah 36:11, 13, Nehemiah 13:24, 2 Chronicles 32:18.
Judith has the same spelling in Genesis 26:34, but the context is clear that that’s a personal name and not the name of the language.
Aramaic ארמית is used the same way 2 Kings 18:26, Isaiah 36:11, Daniel 2:4, and in Aramaic Ezra 4:7.
Jason Hare wrote:The language of the Bible is also called שפת כנען in the text of the Bible,
Nope. At the time that the prophesy of Isaiah 19:18 was fulfilled, the שפת כנען was Aramaic, not Hebrew. The fulfillment was during the Persian era. The Jews who settled Judea and Samaria after the Babylonian exile spoke Aramaic as their mother tongue, Hebrew was a second language used in religion, high literature, official government records and commerce. Much like Latin in medieval Europe. Many of the common people didn’t know Hebrew.
Jason Hare wrote:We have words for these things from the time of the Second Temple, such as מקרא 'Scripture' and כתבי הקדש 'the Holy Writings.' We should not have to limit ourselves to the specific lexicon of the Bible, else we would have to cut out a great many concepts from our modern way of thinking. The goal is to use the structure of the biblical language with supplements as necessary from the modern lexicon. At least, that would be my goal, and I think any other goal would be straining the limits.
If our goal is to study Biblical Hebrew, do we want to discuss modern concepts?
Jason Hare wrote:It is not unusual for biblical Hebrew to have loan words from other (especially Semitic) languages. Take the word בר used for בן in several places in the Tanach. עדן is an ancient word, even if it is from Aramaic, and there is no reason to think that it could not have been imported at some point -- especially since it already appears in the book of Daniel and since other Aramaic words had already made their way into the language.
You have just given a good argument against the common belief that all Hebrew nouns are derived from verbs. I make the same argument. However, many nouns are derived from verbs, the same as in English, just not all of them.
Half of the book of Daniel is in Aramaic, not Hebrew. The word עדן referring to time is found only in the Aramaic section, never in Hebrew.
Jason Hare wrote:I'm sure there were many words that were not used in the writings of the Bible but that were perfectly valid forms. Do you see this as a problem?
Yes. Do you know the derivation patterns for nouns from roots, and how those derivation patterns influence meaning? What about the addition of a ת suffix when not a feminine noun in construct? What meaning does it add? Or is it merely a misspelled feminine plural as the Masoretes thought? What about when a masculine noun is changed to a feminine when we don’t refer to the sex of a living creature? What meanings does that give? English has several patterns when known can be used to make neologisms, do you know those patterns in Biblical Hebrew? If you don’t know them, you can end up with some pretty weird stuff from a Biblical Hebrew point of view when you make neologisms.
Yet I recognize that the vocabulary that we have in Tanakh doesn’t represent an exhaustive list of words used in Biblical times.
Jason Hare wrote:I think Hebrew should be approached more diachronically. As has been said, it is better to teach someone to speak modern English and then learn the idiosyncrasies of Shakespeare and how to understand his writings than it is to have them study Shakespeare without the ability to speak English. A command of the modern tongue can do nothing but assist one in understanding Shakespeare, especially if they constantly have his sonnets open while learning the modern dialect. If we constantly have students reading the Bible while learning a communicative form of the language, I don't see how this would hinder their acquisition of the biblical tongue. To the contrary, I can see it only benefiting them in giving them a wider knowledge of the language.
Here’s the problem with this approach—languages change over time.
Since you mentioned Shakespeare, that’s a good example. I’m a native speaker of American English. One reason I developed a strong distaste for poetry is because poetry was taught using Shakespeare’s sonnets. I didn’t understand the older English. In teaching English as a second language, I don’t touch Shakespeare with a ten-foot pole. I want my students to know English in such a way that they can understand and be understood by speakers of today’s English.
DSS Hebrew (other than the Biblical copies) differs significantly from Biblical Hebrew. It had a different grammar and many words had different definitions. Medieval (Tiberian) Hebrew was a development from DSS Hebrew. So if you plan to teach Biblical Hebrew, why confuse your students with teaching that which is not Biblical Hebrew?
Jason Hare wrote:kwrandolph wrote:The default sentence structure for present action spoken Hebrew is personal pronoun, verb in Qatal, then a possible object.
Default doesn't restrict us. It's clear that there are other options. I chose infinitive absolute with qatal for my first sentence, implying "I really want..."
Yes, I noticed that. But look at the other places where you used participles where Biblical Hebrew would have used Qatal Qal. In Biblical Hebrew, participles are not used as a marker for present tense, for they are used for past as well as future events.
Jason Hare wrote:kwrandolph wrote:The phrase עדן די קשה is Aramaic, not Hebrew.
קשה is Hebrew. די is Hebrew (Isaiah 40, Leviticus 12). The only word borrowed here is עדן, which is in the book of Daniel. I don't mean it as "time of Corona," which is why I imported it to refer to the "AGE of Corona." Sometimes loanwords are brought in to cover concepts that Hebrew itself didn't express. Whereas עדן was the Aramaic equivalent of עת, when it was imported into Hebrew, it was intended to cover a semantic range that the Hebrew terms hadn't covered: "age" or "epoch." How would you say "epoch" in biblical Hebrew? In modern Hebrew, we have עידן "age" and תקופה "period (of time)."
You have several items in this paragraph:
The word די is found in both Aramaic and Hebrew, but with different meanings. In Hebrew it means “sufficiency, completeness, enough has the idea of making whole, having enough Lv 5:7, 12:8, Dt 15:8, Is 40:16” whereas in Aramaic it is a particle of registration, which is how you used it.
The word עדן is Aramaic, not Hebrew, as mentioned above.
For measurements of time, עת was used for a minute to a few decades. For a long, indeterminate time, the word עולם was used. Because Biblical Hebrew didn’t have a word specifically for eternity or eternal, the phrase עולם ועד was sometimes used.
I included קשה here only because it is part of the phrase that you wrote. I don’t know if it appears in Aramaic with the same meaning as in Biblical Hebrew.
Jason Hare wrote:My purpose was that we would write back-and-forth in Hebrew, though. This subforum is for Hebrew Composition
טוב רק מי למד לכתב יהודית: לא למדתי לדבר או לכתב יהודית רק למדתי לקראה: הלמדו אחרים כן: ידעתי כי חפץ דואיין לכתב חידות ומענות וגם הוא לא ידע די לכתב יהודית טובה:
הידעת את אשר כתבתי
Karl W. Randolph.