I'm just saying -- do your homework

So I heard an ad on the radio this morning for property in the next state at prices below $30K  per lot.

It's the same location where the lots originally (about 10 years ago) were advertised in the hundred thousands and more with their lake access and boat docks.

WHAT HAPPENED?

People found out about the lake. There's a nuclear power plant at one end. That's one highly desirable neighborhood.

I've heard stories of people who bought beach houses but not flood insurance and then got wiped out in hurricanes, from Isabel to Sandy to Katrina... you know the rest.

I heard of somebody who bought a house without having it inspected and got very upset when there turned out to be a sludge problem interfering with installation of Internet access, and drafty windows.

I know of a helicopter mom using Roundup on her son's yard in a town where herbicides are illegal and a guy who bought a property in a bird sanctuary and started cutting down trees.

Your American dream is going to turn into a nightmare pretty quick unless you know the laws, the climate, the specific house, and what facilities are nearby.

That includes finding out whether your sanitation system will work when -- not if, when -- the power goes out. Or how long it will take the county to plow the snow and the power company to restore power.

Or whether police, fire, and ambulances can get to you in time to  prevent the worst tragedies.

I'm just saying...

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights  Reserved

Fact-Checking the Torah -- translations

Even though mischsprache is useless as a pillar for DH, it has a hidden assumption that has to be discussed.

Can you analyze Torah that has been translated?

That’s an absurdity. If language layering in Hebrew supposedly helps identify the various documents by placing different verses at different times in Jewish history, then the only valid analysis has to be directed against Torah in Hebrew.

You’re asking, “but if the translation was done by somebody really good, why is it still a problem?” That is, you’re asking if you’re new here. I just spent 50 posts giving you evidence that the translation of a word is not its meaning, which can only be determined in the context of the material where it appears, and the context of that material within the culture (which is a time-limited phenomenon as the Kings List shows), and the context of the transmission format – oral or written, and the context of its grammatical and idiomatic formulation.

But I left one thing out.

I said of dictionaries that lexicographers use prior sources.

The same is true of grammarians of Biblical Hebrew. None of their sources wrote based on the 21^st century understanding of BH. Everybody who has ever written a grammar to use in reading or translating Torah relied on an outdated understanding of the grammar.

So as well as copying historically bad translations like “Ohozath”, translators have been victims of historically bad grammatical explanations.

On top of the fact that verbal expression develops to express the culture. Pretending that this expression records the divisions DH wants to make in Torah is a case of a circular argument. I’ll show evidence later that two of the founding writers in DH did just this: decided where to put the divisions, and then made up reasons why they were right, when the text doesn’t support them.  I’ll also discuss a situation where expression is a diagnostic to authorship and how its procedures differ from DH.

I’ll give more evidence later that grammar makes DH infinitesimally probable. For now, let's look at some of the terminology.

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights  Reserved

21st Century Bible Hebrew -- the copula

Genesis 1:7

 

ז וַיַּעַשׂ אֱלֹהִים אֶת־הָרָקִיעַ וַיַּבְדֵּל בֵּין הַמַּיִם אֲשֶׁר מִתַּחַת לָרָקִיעַ וּבֵין הַמַּיִם אֲשֶׁר מֵעַל לָרָקִיעַ וַיְהִי־כֵן:

 

Translation:     Gd must have made the raqia for it separated the water that is under the raqia from the water that is above the raqia; it must have been so.

 

This verse has the other occurrence of va-yavdel that I was talking about.

 

Look at the phrase after ha-maim beginning with asher. There is no verb from here to the end of the verse, until you get to the certainty epistemic at the end.  Nevertheless, I have “is” in the translation.

 

Hebrew is one of those languages that does not need to express “be” when it is not in imperfect or perfect aspect. The progressive aspect of hayah is extremely rare in Torah; I can think of one occurrence off the top of my head. It might occur some more times in the rest of Tannakh.

 

Since this is an aspectual language, not a tense language, you can see that you don’t need to say “be” except in imperfect aspect, to emphasize that  meaning, or perfect aspect, to emphasize that meaning. Russian, another aspectual language, also almost never uses “be” in this type of equational sentence. And it should be no surprise at all that Arabic leaves a verb out of equational sentences.

 

Notice that I used only two posts to go through this verse.  I told you this would happen.

Next week: why it's not good.

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights  Reserved

Garden - 2018

I can't recommend enough that you check out Mike McGrath's YBYG archives and articles on Garden Plot at WTOP for info on how to have a beautiful yard without poisons -- and also saving you money by not wasting it on harmful practices. As  well as obeying the law.

My HOA is telling people to do things that are harmful to their plants but conform to somebody's idea of how things  should look and also safety issues.

So here is your schedule for next year; you can start now.

1) You can buy open-pollinated seeds for plants that attract beneficial insects, pollinators, and birds NOW. Also buy fully-composted leaf mulch and lay it down no more than 1 inch deep, as bedding for the seeds. The soil and sun will be warm enough for the next couple of weeks; after that you will have to wait until the risk of frost is near zero, about May in the DC region.

2) STOP using any mulch but what is fully composted, and get rid of the old crap in your household trash -- don't send it to city yard waste recycling. Look for the OMRI label on the bag; if it ain't there or it ain't bagged, JUST SAY NO.  I go to my garden store, buy composted leaf mulch, and get somebody to cart it. I know exactly what I'm getting because I have a receipt I can check against the delivery. Don't let your lawn service make this decision for you.

3) Permanently set your lawn mower to 3 inches .  If your lawn service insists on scalping your grass, FIRE THEM. Scalping the lawn encourages Japanese beetles. It also encourages violets but they are pretty and edible and feed the caterpillars of fritillary butterflies, a pollinator. Move some of the violets to a shady moist place and you can get all the benefits without encouraging Japanese beetles.

4) DO NOT PRUNE ANYTHING. Not until mid-January.  From then until the end of March, prune only things like privet. Spring-flowering shrubs like rhododendron (azalea) or forsythia should be pruned soon after the flowers fall. Fruit shrubs should be pruned after the fruit is gone. My exceptions are pruning the twigs that may grow over a sidewalk used by city services, and cutting the stalks that had hydrangea flowers this year.

5) STOP MOWING during summer drought, and after mid-October. The grass will go dormant and not grow. It will take a couple of toad-strangling rains to wake it up again and then you can mow as long as it's not mid-October yet. I have seen  jackasses mowing in December just because it was warm. That was for their satisfaction; it  didn't do the grass any good.

6) SHARPEN YOUR MOWER BLADE. That is, if you are going to keep it once you find you can't set it higher than 2.5 inches. The three-inch setting means from now on you will be cutting grass blades and not grass stems, and the blade won't go dull so fast. Also, the mower blade won't bite into dirt, another reason it goes dull. A low blade setting means you may be digging your own lawn's grave.

7) IN OCTOBER/NOVEMBER plant new shrubs or trees. If you know your USDA Zone, you will know which ones are winter-hardy; they will get all the benefit of the snow as well as the spring rains. Planting them in a summer drought means you will have to spend lots of time every day watering them heavily to preserve your investment. Make sure you know how much distance to leave from other trees, houses and utilities, because if your new sapling has to be cut down, that's another waste of your investment.

8) START ERADICATING TERMITES. McGrath has a list of steps for this and they are all free. One is, do NOT put compost within 6 inches of your house and the further away the better. Another is TURN OFF ALL OUTDOOR LIGHTING AT NIGHT. If you are not a farmer you don't need a dusk-to-dawn light anyway and it attracts termites. It also discourages bug-eating bats and mole-eating owls. (Terminex admitted to McGrath that they know all about this. One of his best posts.)

9) Control mosquitoes. Dumping water only helps with our old-fashioned skeeters. The Zika ones hang on to the surface once the water is dumped. Skeeters also lay eggs in the cups of small flowers. BUY GRANULAR BTI, a bacterium that kills the larvae and so far is known to affect only mosquitoes. Place jar lids upside down around your flowers.  Mix up the BTI with water per directions, and fill the jar lids. The skeeters will lay in what seem to be safe places, but nothing will hatch. You can also plant lots of things that will repel skeeters, from lemon verbena in the south to Mexican marigolds to bee balm and rosemary, mints and lavender.

10) MAINTAIN YOUR YARD. You have to know what to do to keep your plantings from becoming invasive.  Most of the "weeds" in our yards were originally planted for specific reasons and got out of control. Examples are dandelions (you can get your revenge by eating the leaves before they flower) and ground ivy AKA creeping Charlie. In my town, we constantly have to cut Rose of Sharon seedlings to keep it from taking over, although most of us leave some for bees and hummingbirds.

11) DISPOSE OF YARD DEBRIS PROPERLY. All  of your grass clippings should be left on the lawn as mulch, so that everything pulled out of the soil goes right back in. Same thing with weeds when they are fully composted. All of your tree leaves should have your mower run over them to crunch them up, for the same reason. You don't need to pay for composted leaf mulch if you or your neighbors have trees. Ground ivy can be composted. English ivy can't, it doesn't decay.  English and  poison ivy should be bagged with the household trash, not sent to your town yard waste recycling center.

12) No drugs. No herbicides, pesticides, or chemical "food".  Those labels saying "harmful if ingested" go triple for our beneficial insects and birds. Monsanto bribed EPA officials to suppress carcinogenic data about Roundup and Bayer's "shrub control" drug kills pollinators, ruining our food supply. The first time your new lawn service shows up for a full treatment, make them show you every package they take out and write down the name of the active ingredient(s). Then make them wait while you google the products. You might end up firing the lawn service immediately.

13) NO HARDSCAPING.  Fireflies, which are beneficial in both adults and larvae, are on the decline due to hardscaping. Once you hardscape, you can't mow. Weeds survive by growing where nothing else can; hardscaping won't prevent weeds and you have to get down and pull them since you can't mow. Also see #12 above.

14) KNOW WHEN AND HOW TO WATER. Look, grass doesn't produce food so don't water it. Let it go dormant in the summer drought. For other things, water THE ROOTS deeply before 10 a.m. every other day if it's not going to rain. Spraying it on the leaves -- of grass as well as other plants -- creates a billion little magnifying glasses that concentrate the sunlight, which burns the leaves, and it's wasteful. Night-time watering brings the slugs which you wouldn't have if you hadn't hardscaped over the firefly larvae.

15) Never let anybody touch your landscape if they can't show certification of expertise or they won't give you all the time you want to read the contract. Maryland has a tree expert licensing program. University of Maryland's state extension service runs a Master Gardener program. Most lawn services either use poisons or  they do the same dumb things that already caused problems with your yard, only they make you pay for it. Make sure to read cancellation clauses in your contract carefully. One "green" company is also known for making cancellation nearly impossible. Never contract with door to door sales for anything. No, I mean it, ANYTHING.

Now when I tell you not to hire a yard service, the first thing you think is "she must be nuts, I don't have time for all that work." But look again. I told you DON'T mow when there's a drought; DON'T prune except once a year at the right time for your shrubs; DON'T get out that damned fertilizer spreader but use the compost nature provides; DON'T run around spraying poison on things; DON'T hardscape or you'll have to weed by hand; DON'T rake up your grass clippings or leaves and bag them; DON'T spread all that hardwood mulch that you'll only have to throw out when the problems start; DON'T plant fancy hybrids that you have to fuss over and replant every year because they won't breed more like them; DON'T dump your birdbath every day but dope it with skeeter killer.

I've also saved you all the money you used to spend on poisons and yard drugs and the emergency room fees when your kids or pets got sick from them, and the labor you used to pay your lawn service for (labor is always more expensive than consumables), and the price of replacing landscaping that died because you didn't treat it right, and the gasoline in your mower, and the money the garden shop talked you into spending on things that are bad for your plants.

I have posted most of this info before but every day there are people moving into houses with yards and wasting their money on goods and services because they don't know what they're doing, or because they copy people in their neighborhoods who are also clueless. And I'm just a pale shadow of the help Mike McGrath deals out all the time. Every time you have a yard problem, go to his archives for the fix. The 15 steps above are the ones that cause the most trouble, but YMMV.

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights  Reserved

Fact-Checking the Torah -- grammar

DH proposes that Biblical Hebrew is a mischsprache, that Hebrew developed in layers through collision with other cultures. The second pillar of DH says that this development left traces in the language and style of each of the documents. DH says that while the four documents were ripped apart and then enfiladed back together so that nobody realized for centuries what their origin was, nevertheless the language layering features and style of writing were preserved and that clever men figured it out centuries later.

This runs smack into contradictory evidence about the history of Hebrew and other languages.

The true description for how new languages develop under the mutual influence of multiple languages is sometimes called creolization. Not just the word usage but also the grammar changes. (Notice how the two base rules of SWLT are addressed in this description.) There is always an interim point where the creole language looks like it has a deviant grammar compared to its contributors; if it survives it develops a different characteristic grammar.

English is a creole language with its origin in the Celtic languages used in Britain preceding the Roman and Germanic invasions. It gathered material from the Latin, Anglo-Saxon and Norse languages. The Norman invasion brought French influence, including “hard” and “soft” versions of the letters c and g, and then we watch it go through its grammatical changes through Wace and Malory to Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Mrs. Humphrey Ward, Georgette Heyer, etc.

Yiddish is also a creole with its roots in the Old High German of Europe. Brought to Russia during the reign of Catherine the Great, it acquired Russian particles and suffixes, among other things. Emigres to America further produced the creole Yeshivish, which adds technical terms from Talmud study and also re-imagines their meaning. After its bearers passed through Ellis Island, it acquired English words spoken in a New York accent, but grammatically Yeshivish tends to resemble Yiddish. You can hear Yeshivish spoken in R. Dovid Grossman’s recordings of his lectures on Babylonian Talmud at the Harvard website.

The main issue of creolization is that grammar thing. While a creole develops, its grammar changes. If Biblical Hebrew creolized between 800 and 400 BCE, its grammar would have changed and this would show up in JEDP. The grammar is, however, consistent throughout the Hebrew material in Tannakh, with modal morphologies and use of the narrative past as defined in Dr. Cook’s dissertation.

The only way DH can explain the consistent grammar throughout Torah is that their incompetent editor was a competent grammarian and rewrote deviant forms to agree with the language that he spoke. However, redactors would not have known how to produce good grammar in Biblical Hebrew unless they learned it as a first language.  The people who transmitted Torah down to post-Captivity times probably did not have grammar books.

The same is true of every writer responsible for some Hebrew post-Torah book in Tannakh. They all had to speak and think in Biblical Hebrew to write using the same grammar that Torah uses, which they do.

Using external evidence, we can understand this in the light of the succession of cuneiform texts that have survived. In Jacobson’s discussion of how we found out that the Kings List was a compilation with fudging of the numbers, he points out grammatical differences in the city king  list sources, and the compilation made by Ur III scribes. The vernacular of the post-Gutian period didn’t use the same grammar as the pre-Gutian period. The same thing happened in the 1700s BCE when the prequel was added.

We have word lists in cuneiform for multiple versions of ancient Semitic languages. But if there were any grammars, they did not survive that I have heard of to date; tell me if you know of one that was compiled back then, as opposed to Cyrus Gordon’s grammar of Ugaritic from the 1960s. Such a sharp contrast in preservation suggests there were no grammars. The bad grammarians of the kings list could not produce the right text because they hadn’t learned it on the street, neither had their teachers, and so on for decades into their history. This same argument works with the grammar of Amos and Hoshea.

The DH pillar of style and language has to drop the concept of language layering because it is based on a fallacy and also makes extraordinary claims that don’t jibe with studies in linguistics.

Now let’s look at the consequence of the mischsprache concept, which has implications for some of the oldest work done on DH.

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights  Reserved

21st Century Bible Hebrew -- Genesis 1:7 -- narrator credibility

Genesis 1:7

ז וַיַּעַשׂ אֱלֹהִים אֶת־הָרָקִיעַ וַיַּבְדֵּל בֵּין הַמַּיִם אֲשֶׁר מִתַּחַת לָרָקִיעַ וּבֵין הַמַּיִם אֲשֶׁר מֵעַל לָרָקִיעַ וַיְהִי־כֵן:

 

Transliteration: Va-yaas elohim et-haraqia vayavdel ben ha-maim asher mitachat laraqia uven ha-maim asher me-al laraqia va-y’hi khen.

Translation:     Gd must made the raqia for it separated the water that is under the raqia from the water that is above the raqia; it must have been so.

Letters in this lesson: שׂ

 

Vocabulary in this lesson:

 

יַּעַשׂ	make, do
מִ, מֵ	from, away from, toward
אֲשֶׁר	that, which
תַּחַת	under
מֵעַל	above
כֵן	thus, true

 

I’m going to give you the qal imperfect of asah, a lamed heh verb which opens this verse in a certainty epistemic. Memorize this to cut down on needing the dictionary.

 

Singular	Plural	Person/gender
אֶעֱשֶה	נַעֲשֶה	First
תַּעֲשֶה	תַּעֲשוּ	Second/masculine
תַּעֲשֶה	תַּעֲשֶינָה	Second/feminine
יַעֲשֶה	יַעֲשוּ	Third/masculine
תַּעֲשֶׁה	תַּעֲשֶינָה	Third/feminine

 

Notice that this is one of those certainty epistemics followed by a narrative past that shows why such a thing had to have happened.

 

Also notice the certainty epistemic at the end; this validates the credibility of what went before it.

 

In oral narratives, narrators always have a credibility problem because their audiences were not witnesses to the events. All the narrator can do is point verbally at something which the audience has witnessed. We already saw one example of this: the existence of light and dark.

 

Later in Torah you will find that narrators not only point at the phenomena of creation, they also name geographical features. The geography thing is part of Axel Olrik’s principles that describe the fine-level structure of oral narratives. The grammatical thing is another take on the same issue. This dovetailing of the two men’s work made me believe Dr. Cook had things right.

 

Why does the narrator have to endorse his own credibility? Because the raqia is not like dark and light, it is not perceptible to mortals.

 

There’s an implication here that above the first raqia there is water. Babylonian Talmud Tractate Chagigah 14 tells the story of four sages, one of whom was the martyr Rabbi Akiva. He warned his fellows, while they prepared for a mortal ascension to heaven, not to say “water, water”. Two other commentaries go on to say from a mystical point of view that the raqia separates two kinds of water, but that the separation itself is unified and in it they are unified. Thus there may be many facets to Gd, but they are not Gd in and of themselves: Gd is One.

 

R. Akiva had three colleagues in this trip. They didn’t heed his warning but focussed on the different aspects of Gd. One was the man who blew his mind over the waters in an earlier verse; his orientation had too much of the material in it. My take: while the raqia separates a physical phenomenon into parts, Gd is not that physical phenomenon and is not separated by the raqia but penetrates it and thus His spirit could waft over the waters without becoming finite. This rabbi didn’t think that far into it, and that’s why he blew his mind.

 

A second colleague named ben Azzai “looked and died”; his orientation focused too much on knowledge which, when not tempered by Divine Mercy, results in strictness in judgments. The strictest punishment in Torah is the death penalty and he suffered by that wherewith he sinned.

 

The third colleague was Elisha ben Abuya, a teacher of the Rabbi Meir who transmitted to posterity a mass of halakhah (Gittin 4) from his other teacher – R. Akiva. R. Elisha “gazed and cut the plants”; he became an apostate. He later told his pupil that he had heard from behind the Heavenly Veil a prophecy that he would never repent of his sins, and he lost all desire to obey the commandments. R. Meir met up with him one Shabbat riding a horse, which is prohibited, and R. Elisha told him that he was sinning so as to lead others into sin. Talmud says such a thing makes true repentance impossible so, in a way, R. Elisha was doing exactly what would fulfill the prophecy. R. Meir never left off trying to bring R. Elisha back into obedience to the commandments.

 

Only R. Akiva had the spiritual purity and strength to survive this ascension in his right mind and without apostasy. Which is a complete refutation to R. Elisha, because R. Akiva rebelled against rabbinical ordinances until he was 40. He fell in love and the lady’s father refused to agree to the match unless R. Akiva changed his ways. The holy maiden convinced him to do that and they were married.

Next week: an important feature of aspectual languages.  

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights  Reserved

Maximum coverage -- 80% totality

p.s. in case you were wondering, an eclipse is one thing JEWS DON'T HAVE A SPECIFIC BLESSING FOR!  Thank you Chabad.org  but that's amazing!

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights  Reserved