America

My town held its Little League Parade and for the  first time I was able to shoot some video of it.

If you can see flashing lights through the trees, that's a vintage fire truck that always leads the parade.

Out of the video at the end of the parade are the usual parents with baby strollers, dogs, and balloons.

If this link doesn't work, let me know.

Fact-Checking the Torah -- philology

If A.H. Sayce had studied SWLT and heeded its warnings, he would never have equated shabbatum from the time of Cambyses with the Jewish Shabbat referred to 3 or 4 centuries earlier in Amos and Hoshea, because he would have realized that philology had led him into a false friends situation.  Unfortunately for him, SWLT didn’t exist yet.

Philology, of course, is the science of words and it has thrown up a number of mistaken conclusions.  Even in the 21^st century.

According to 2013 news reports, an academic paper used distribution of common words to claim that Indo-Europeans spread from middle Asia through the Kurgan culture, bringing with them wheeled vehicles and the horse.  However, linguistic and genetic studies now argue for an Indo-European origin in Anatolia (sound familiar?), and the distribution of the targeted words and histories of the cultures don’t agree.

The word for “horse” in Akkadian, sisu, dates to the Ur III dynasty, when Utu-Hengel chased out the Gutians (remember them?).  The Gutians were Indo-Europeans who came over the Zagros mountains from a place called Teukri in Anatolia.  It’s hard for me to escape the conclusion that the Gutians brought horses and horse-drawn chariots to Mesopotamia which, up to then, used foot soldiers.

The burial kurgans in Anatolia are few and limited to regions closest to central Asia where the kurgan culture was endemic.  The Hittites, who ruled much of Anatolia, used cremation not kurgans, and yet the Hittites were famous for having horses.  The Hittite word for “horse” is asva, and there has long been an urban legend classing them as Indo-Europeans.

Uh-oh.  The “u” word.  

The conclusion is a case of philology gone wrong.  The Hittite language has affinities with Avestan and Sanskrit that no Indo-European language has.  For one thing, they share a root for “night” which has become shab (“shab bekheyr”, “good night”) in modern Persian, an Indo-Iranian language.  Greek has a similar root for a word meaning “dark,” which night certainly is. 

But the word for night in the Greek language, and its cognate in all Indo-European languages, nyx/nox/notte/nuit/noche/noch’/nos/nacht, is Anatolian in origin. (It’s also feminine.)

The Hebrew word for horse is sus, a pretty close cognate to the Akkadian word, and both languages are Semitic, not Indo-European OR Indo-Iranian.  The word in ancient Egyptian is ss, which I have seen voweled as ses.  Egyptian is neither Indo-European or Indo-Iranian.

SWLT says that word usage is culture-based, and the uniting cultural feature that would have brought the same word for “horse” to distant Egypt, would have been trade of horses between Anatolia and Egypt, mediated as early as the 15^th dynasty by the forebears of the Hyksos rulers of the 17^th dynasty, and thus passing through the Holy Land. 

It’s the context, stupid!  And that includes history and culture as well as the actual look or sound of the words.

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights  Reserved

21st Century Bible Hebrew -- all kinds of imperfect

Genesis 1:3

 

ג וַיֹּאמֶר אֱלֹהִים יְהִי־אוֹר וַיְהִי־אוֹר:

 

Translation:     Gd said Let light exist and light existed.

 

The syntax you see in the above verse is typical for narrative imperfect.

 

Vav plus imperfect as one word, followed by the subject, is standard for narrative imperfect.

 

Never never forget this. Unless the subject is understood from the surrounding context, the subject will come after the narrative imperfect.

 

If there were no vav we would have a possible true future use of the imperfect, implying that the events have not yet occurred, but we can tell that this is not the case BECAUSE of the syntax.

 

A future use of the imperfect does not use vav, and the syntax is subject + verb, unless there is an adverb, and then the adverb comes first just like verse 1.

 

There’s a third possibility but we won’t see an example of that until chapter 2 which is who knows how far away.

 

But teacher, you’re saying, there are two more things in there that start with yod just like the imperfect. Are those peh yod verbs or are they imperfect?

 

Neither.

 

Yikes.

 

The first one is jussive and the second one is a special verb form discussed by Dr. Cook.

 

The jussive is a form of imperative but it’s 3^rd person.

 

I’m going to stop there because this leads to two important discussions.

 

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights  Reserved

Garden -- bearing fruit

You gardeners know how patient you have to be sometimes.

At other times...
This first picture is my 30 year old hydrangea. No lie. The people before me planted it. The brown things are leaves that got frosted recently but notice that the old wood is leafing  out again, so I should get flowers this year.

These lilies  of the valley came up on their own and I've preserved them since they seem to be quite happy growing through the bricks for the  last 25 years. Near them below this photo is a fern that migrated from a neighbor's yard. It is in the spore stage now.

Here is a frowsy little patch but if you  have good eyes you can see the leaves of the violets that bloomed last week. A neighbor who  doesn't like them (!) dug them out of her yard and I asked for them. Notice the lily of the valley to the right, which is the descendant of some that I DID transplant.

And here is what looks like a personal triumph. This is shady ground next to the hydrangea, where hosta were starting to take over. I'm no fan of hosta so I dug some of them out and ordered a couple of roots of wild ginger. That was two years ago and they bloomed for the first time last year; they bloomed again last week  and I apologize for not getting a picture then.  It's a native plant to my region so I doubt anybody is going to complain no matter how far they spread.

And that's an example of how sometimes gardeners don't have to wait all  that long.

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights  Reserved

Fact-Checking the Torah -- Ambiguity

All right.  What kind of fallacies do academics use when dealing with languages and the problems created by translations and commentaries.

The one that probably makes most sense to you at this point is ambiguity.  An academic disagreed with SWLT because, he claimed, it made translation impossible.

Which is a funny thing to me, because I know that translation has gone on for centuries but SWLT is less than a century old.

I learned about one of the main problems of translation long before I ever heard of S and W.

In high school, the woman who taught us the French language did a lot of work to make us sensitive to “false friends.”

Those are words and phrases that look like English ones, deceptively so, because they absolutely cannot be translated into the English words they resemble and still preserve the same meaning as the French.

One of the best examples is demander.  It doesn’t mean make a demand on somebody, with more or less hostility.  It simply means to ask a question.

False friends don’t just happen between French and English.  They happen between Romance languages.  French entendre doesn’t mean exactly the same thing as Spanish entender.

They also happen between Russian and English.  In the Mendel Beilis translation I came across the term lombardny bilet.  At first I thought it meant the record of a promise to pay a loan, because the Lombards of Italy were brought into England to help finance the government, after the Jews were expelled from England.  As I worked, however, it turned out that lombardny bilet meant a record of a loan.  Two people said they had them for evidence, one of whom was probably telling the truth and the other of whom lied almost as often as she spoke. The term refers either to bonds taken out to pay back money, apparently secured on future income, or pawnbroker’s tickets.

“False friends” have been known at least ever since boys had to construe Latin and Classical Greek for their tutors or in preparatory and public schools.  So SWLT does not cause problems with translations, it only shows why a given translation has problems.

But one thing SWLT excels at is putting a governor on claims of the science of philology, and that is next week’s post.

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights  Reserved

21st Century Bible Hebrew -- Vayomer ESSENTIAL

Genesis 1:3

ג וַיֹּאמֶר אֱלֹהִים יְהִי־אוֹר וַיְהִי־אוֹר:

 

Transliteration: Va-yomer elohim y’hi or va-y’hi or.

Translation:     Gd said Let light exist and light existed.

 

Vocabulary in this lesson: 

יֹּאמֶר	he said
יְהִי	Let X exist
אוֹר	light

 

So let’s classify this bad boy.

 

Va-yomer is a peh alef verb and you know that alef is one of the four guttural letters, right?

 

It’s in the qal binyan.

 

As I said, it’s narrative imperfect.

 

It’s 3^rd masculine singular.

 

You will see this verb scores if not hundreds of times in Torah so memorize the table and save yourself some lookup time.

 

Singular	Plural	Person/gender
אוֹמַר	נֹאמַר	First
תֹּאמַר	תֹּאמְרוּ	Second/masculine
תֹּאמְרִי	תֹּאמַרְנָה	Second/feminine
יֹאמַר	יֹאמְרוּ	Third/masculine
תֹּאמְרִי	תֹּאמַרְנָה	Third/feminine

 

In case you were wondering why there’s a dagesh in those tavs, it’s almost beyond the scope of this course.  If you catch an imperfect 2^nd or a 3^rd feminine  without dagesh, email me and we’ll look at it.

 

Now. The other thing you should be asking is why I didn’t put the vav in the conjugation table. That’s because this same form is the plain imperfect aspect, and without vav it often has a true future meaning. I’ll talk about that next week. Damn. That’s six things.

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights  Reserved

Wuh!

30K!

This blog has been running less than 4 years and you've viewed it 30K times!

I am both humbled and flattered.

Especially as so much of what I posted has been special interest stuff.

And your views have come from around the world.

There's more to come: the 4th part of the Fact-Checking blog is a couple of months ahead; the rest of the 21st century Bible Hebrew; more knitting; new garden stuff as I find it.

THANK YOU EVERYBODY!

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights  Reserved