Jonathan:
Jemoh66 wrote:Karl,
I really like your response. Your methodology is consistent with the well recognized idea that BH is an action oriented language. That's why love is something you do, not something you feel.
Jonathan Mohler
Here we need to be careful. Was this dynamism an intrinsic part of the language, or how it was used?
My opinion is that the dynamism comes from the way the language was used, not intrinsic to the language itself. Because it’s from the use rather than intrinsic to the language, that means that 1) it’s possible to use Hebrew in a non-dynamic fashion, and 2) it’s possible to use other languages in a similarly dynamic manner.
An example of #2 above is the Greek used in the New Testament—it uses the same dynamism in Greek as found in Hebrew in the Tanakh. While I personally have no direct knowledge of the Talmud, I have been informed by others that Hebrew and Aramaic are used in the same non-dynamic manner as was Greek among the Greek philosophers.
Now this carries over into lexicography—I try to show the action behind the lexeme, whereas most people try to show the form. Form looks at where the action takes place and how it fits in its immediate situation. Even actions are defined according to the form of the action. As a result, a lexeme can have several meanings, one to fit each situation.
But when defining according to action, often the same action can be recognized in several contexts. That is not the same as claiming that each lexeme has one and only one meaning, because there are such things as homonyms and in Hebrew also homographs, spelled the same way though may have had different pronunciations. But recognizing that actions may be used in many contexts greatly reduces the number of vocabulary one needs to learn in order to use a language.
As for translation, my experience is that seldom does a word in one language have exactly the same meaning in another, often not even in close cognate languages. Therefore, it’s common to use different words in a target language for the same word in the originating language. My goal was and is not to write a translator’s dictionary, rather one to help to understand the language as closely as a native speaker would have used it, which means recognizing the action and to try to indicate how widely that action was recognized by native speakers.
I used that method when learning modern languages, I see no reason not to use the same method when learning Biblical Hebrew.
Karl W. Randolph.