Word Order in Biblical Hebrew Narrative

Goldfajn, Tal

doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198269533.003.0006

Cited by 3 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 0 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…The standard view since the nineteenth century has been that these forms signal perfective and imperfective aspect. I have argued elsewhere (Goldfajn 1998), however, that the primary function of these forms is not to mark aspect as it is commonly held but rather to locate events in relation to temporal coordinates in the text. In this last section, I want to suggest that depending on whether the translators adhere to a tense-based account of BH or to the aspect theory or to any other theory for that matter, their actual rendering of these forms will be different.…”

Section: "Better a Sparrow Living Or Dead Than No Birdsong At All"mentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Translating linguistic time

Goldfajn¹

2021

LANS-TTS

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

If Sartre is right and the tense of a text holds the key to its special strangeness (1947), how does this strangeness fare in translation? What can we learn from looking at the translation of grammatical tense and aspect in narrative texts in different languages? It is often simply assumed that translating grammatical cate gories of time in languages - because it has to do with what is considered the hard core of language, i.e. the grammar as opposed to the lexicon of the language - mainly involves mere linguistic constraints. Jakobson ’s famous motto (1987: 433) - “languages differ essentially in what they must convey and not in what they can convey”- would therefore suffice to tell the whole story about the way in which linguistic time is translated. This paper argues, however, that this is not the whole story: it argues that the choice of tense in translation is more than just a grammatical agenda, and may actually reflect a number of different commitments. Section 2 examines some intriguing tense changes in the translation of children ’s literature: it discusses the motivations behind these changes and shows that by changing the ‘how’ of the original story through the tense choice the entire subjective perspective of the text is altered. Section 3 identifies a few patterns in the translation of past distinctions in Modern Hebrew. It suggests that in contrast to the more diversified means of translating aspectual meanings in previous decades, a major trend in the last decade or so has been to reduce all past sphere distinctions essentially to one single form, i.e. the simple past tense. Finally section 4 deals with the classical problem regarding the Biblical Hebrew tenses and their translation; it shows that the translation of the biblical verbs may be strongly determined by the different linguistic ideas (and even systematic theories) the translators adopt regarding the Biblical Hebrew tenses. In all these cases then, we observe that the translation of temporal meanings involves not only a commitment to specific temporal interpretations but also a commitment to more subtle conceptions of subjectivity in translation, of literary conventions and linguistic ideas.

show abstract

Section: "Better a Sparrow Living Or Dead Than No Birdsong At All"mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…So if it is atemporal it cannot have a future reference. 10 It indicates that bounded events followed each other continuously in the past of either some explicit speech time or a context-specified time (Goldfajn 1998).…”

Section: Primary Textsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Translating linguistic time

Goldfajn¹

2021

LANS-TTS

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Across the language, benoni forms are morphologically under-specified since, unlike verbs in Past and Future, they are marked only for Number and Gender, not for Person. Historically, this reflects their status in classical Hebrew as participial forms intermediate between verbs and nouns (Gesenius, 1910; Goldfajn, 1998), while in current Hebrew, they are not strictly speaking ‘tensed verbs’ on a par with Past and Future (Berman, 1978). Most relevantly in the present context, benoni forms are inflected like Nouns and Adjectives, with which they share the same suffixes ( -a and -et for Feminine Gender and -im and -ot for Plural Masculine and Feminine respectively).…”

Section: Findings and Analysismentioning

confidence: 99%

Developing structural specification: Productivity in early Hebrew verb usage

Lustigman

2012

First Language

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The study investigates acquisition of verb inflections by four monolingual Hebrewacquiring children from middle-class backgrounds, audio-recorded in longitudinal, weekly samples at a mean age-range of between 18 and 26 months. Productive use of inflectional morphology is shown to manifest increasing structural specification, as a function of children's developing knowledge of morphology-syntax interfaces illustrated by Subject-Verb agreement. The verbs used by all four children evolve from nonspecified stem-like forms via sporadic structural alternations to initial productivity in the use of largely under-specified inflected forms. This process of increasing structural specification is interpreted as reflecting paradigmatic/syntagmatic interfacings in developing grammatical productivity, such that eventually a full range of inflectional contrasts is manifested in all and only appropriate syntactic environments.

show abstract

“…That the issue is complex is established both by the diversity of word orders exhibited in the ancient texts, especially the Bible, and by the attention that word order variation receives in general linguistics. 1 And that it is unsettled-that a universally satisfying, comprehensive, adequate description of ancient Hebrew word order variation has yet to appear-is confirmed by the appearance of Moshavi 2010, which joins the monographs of Gross 1996, 2001, Rosenbaum 1997, Goldfajn 1998, Heimerdinger 1999, Shimasaki 2002 and Lunn 2006, 3 besides numerous articles and a few theses. 4 The monographs and articles listed above or in note 4 approach the analysis of word order variation in the Hebrew Bible from different linguistic frameworks (although it is notable that only DeCaen, Doron, and myself utilize some form of generative syntactic theory), take up differing pragmatic concepts that influence word order (e.g., topic, focus, theme, rheme), and often use different corpora from within the Bible (for example, Rosenbaum 1997uses Isaiah 40-55, while Lunn 2006 addresses poetic texts including Pss 1-50, whereas most, including Moshavi 2010, use data from Genesis to 2 Kings).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Typological Classification of the Hebrew of Genesis: Subject-Verb or Verb-Subject?

Holmstedt¹

2011

JHS

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

, the Object can precede or follow both the Subject and the Verb, and adverbs and prepositional phrases can be thrown into a variety of positions. To the reader word order often seems to be random, but grammarians have long agreed that it is not random or ‘free’. Describing precisely what determines the order of words, though, remains an elusive task. Yet, it is universally understood that determining a rhyme and reason for the variation exhibited in the biblical texts would provide access to subtle linguistic cues the ancient authors used to get their message across. And so many Hebraists have attempted to identify the patterns. As with all investigations, though, the initial assumptions strongly influence the conclusions and for Hebrew word order studies the almost universal starting point has been to assume a basic Verb-Subject order. In this essay I challenge this assumption, thereby potentially undercutting the methodologies and conclusions of the vast majority of existing word order studies. I introduce, describe, and illustrate the typological linguistic criteria for determining basic word order and conclude, contrary to near-consensus position, that Biblical Hebrew is better classified as a Subject-Verb language.

show abstract

Word Order in Biblical Hebrew Narrative

Cited by 3 publications

References 0 publications

Translating linguistic time

Translating linguistic time

Developing structural specification: Productivity in early Hebrew verb usage

The Typological Classification of the Hebrew of Genesis: Subject-Verb or Verb-Subject?

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About