25.5146, Review: Historical Ling; History of Ling: Thomas (2014)

Wed Dec 17 19:13:22 UTC 2014

LINGUIST List: Vol-25-5146. Wed Dec 17 2014. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 25.5146, Review: Historical Ling; History of Ling: Thomas (2014)

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Date: Wed, 17 Dec 2014 14:12:36
From: Geoffrey Sampson [sampson at cantab.net]
Subject: The Recovery of the Ancient Hebrew Language

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Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/25/25-2042.html

AUTHOR: David Winton  Thomas
TITLE: The Recovery of the Ancient Hebrew Language
SUBTITLE: An Inaugural Lecture
PUBLISHER: Cambridge University Press
YEAR: 2014

REVIEWER: Geoffrey Sampson, University of South Africa

Review's Editor: Helen Aristar-Dry

SUMMARY

This little book (33 small-format pages of text and a few pages of endnotes)
is a reprint of the inaugural lecture which David Thomas delivered in 1939 as
Regius Professor of Hebrew at Cambridge.

Biblical Hebrew, as commonly studied by Jews and Christians, was fixed in the
shape we know by the ''Masoretes'' who edited the Old Testament into its
canonical form in the early Middle Ages, long after Hebrew had ceased to be a
spoken language.  The Masoretes were confronted with a range of documents
stemming from widely different periods a thousand years and more before their
own time, written in a script which indicated only consonant phonemes and
which doubtless included discrepancies between different copies of the same
texts.  From these they produced a single agreed edition in a script which
represented all aspects of pronunciation very exactly.  The result was a
timeless, monolithic holy language which is to some extent an artificial
creation.  Behind it there must have lain a living colloquial language, which
will have changed in many ways over the centuries between the earliest parts
of the Pentateuch and late books such as Esther.  Thomas's topic is the
efforts, still fairly new when he was speaking, to use novel methods and data
to reveal that real-life, evolving Hebrew language.

It had long been realized that Hebrew was one member of a Semitic
language-family, and Hebrew scholars often mentioned forms from
sister-languages such as Arabic or Syriac when elucidating Hebrew vocabulary
or grammar.  But traditionally Hebraists had believed that the help obtainable
that way was quite limited, because the literary monuments of the
sister-languages were much younger than the Hebrew scriptures.  However, by
the time of Thomas's lecture archaeology had begun to provide evidence for
earlier stages of these languages, helping linguists to infer how they had
diverged from a common proto-Semitic ancestor.  Furthermore, people such as
Pontus Leander (1920) were beginning to apply the standard linguistic
techniques of internal reconstruction to show how sound-alternations which
were fixed facts of Masoretic Hebrew pointed to sound-laws that had operated
at specific periods.  For instance, the law which changed word-initial /w/ to
/j/, giving e.g. Biblical /jájin/ ''wine'' from earlier *wajin, must have
preceded at least the Book of Esther, since that mentioned the Persian names
Washti and Wajzatha' (in the English Bible, ''Vashti'' and ''Vaizatha''), and
these were not Hebraized as *Ja… .

One of Thomas's general conclusions was that the Masoretic text was more
reliable than sometimes supposed.  Scholars had noticed discrepancies between
the Hebrew Bible and the Septuagint, the translation into Greek made by Jewish
authorities at a period when that language was the lingua franca of the
Levant, and had explained these by supposing that the Septuagint translators
must have been working from some different and perhaps superior version of the
Hebrew text.  Thomas believed, on the contrary, that the kinds of evidence
mentioned above could be used to show that Hebrew words had meanings other
than the ones which have come down to us:  the discrepancies stemmed not from
errors by the Masoretes but from our later misunderstanding of their language.

EVALUATION

Universities routinely publish inaugural lectures, but commonly these are not
circulated very widely.  In my experience they tend to function more as
pleasant keepsakes for a new professor's friends and intellectual allies than
as significant contributions to scholarship.  In the case of an intellectual
giant even his inaugural might offer valuable insights into the development of
his thought, but that hardly explains the reprinting of Thomas's lecture after
75 years.  The account of Thomas's work by John Emerton (1991), his successor
in the Regius chair, presumably made the best case it could, but the portrait
it offers is of a man who did sterling service as a teacher and an organizer,
but who as a researcher was unoriginal, serving mainly to extend the work and
ideas of the far more distinguished Sir Godfrey Driver, whose pupil he had
been.  Much of Thomas's career was dedicated to continuing the work begun by
Driver towards compiling a new Hebrew dictionary that should take due account
of new, non-Biblical data.  Unfortunately, when Thomas died in 1970 it emerged
that what Driver and he had done between them did not amount to anything that
could be brought into a publishable shape.  At present the standard Hebrew
dictionary is still Brown (1906), the work which Driver and Thomas had hoped
to supersede (though there are now plans to do what Driver and Thomas did not
manage to do -- see Hackett and Huehnergard 2008).

Thomas did publish a number of papers offering new ideas about the meanings of
individual lexical items.  (Emerton makes it clear that some of these
suggestions are worthwhile and others were at least reasonable at the time
they were made, but a number of them are not tenable in the light of
present-day scholarship.)  Where this lecture made wider claims about the
linguistics of Hebrew, subsequent decades seem to have dealt with these fairly
harshly.  

Consider, for instance, what Thomas says about the so-called waw consecutive,
surely the most puzzling single feature of Biblical Hebrew grammar for us
today.  Hebrew had two ways of inflecting verbs for person and number,
sometimes called ''suffix conjugation'' and ''prefix conjugation''.  The
contrasting conjugations stood for a variety of meaning-contrasts expressed in
European languages by tense, aspect, and modal inflexions:  suffix v. prefix
conjugations could in different contexts correspond respectively to past or
present v. future, complete v. continuing, actual v. hypothetical, etc. 
However, Hebrew was a verb-first language, and if a clause (and hence a verb)
was introduced by the prefix /w-/, ''and'' (written with the letter named
waw), to a close approximation the implications of the two conjugations were
reversed:  ''and'' + ''I shall go'' meant ''and I went'', and vice versa. 
Such at least was the traditional Jewish understanding of the phenomenon;
linguists more recently (e.g. Niccacci 1994) have suggested that the semantic
implications of /w-/ + prefix conjugation are not exactly identical to suffix
conjugation, but waw consecutive remains a very strange, hard-to-explain
feature.  Thomas, referring to Driver's writing, claimed that waw consecutive
could be explained in terms of Hebrew being a ''mixed language'', a concept
which recurs throughout his lecture.  Of course all languages contain some
elements borrowed from other languages, but Thomas and Driver (and others)
believed that Hebrew was ''mixed'' in a deeper sense:  that it was something
like a creole combining large elements of different Semitic languages, and
that this somehow accounted for the contradictory uses of the two
conjugations.  However, this creole idea related to theories about the origin
of the Israelites which are no longer taken seriously (Rainey 2008), and the
Wikipedia tells us, I believe correctly, that '' 'mixed language' explanations
[of waw consecutive] … are not commonly accepted among current linguists''
(''Waw-consecutive'' entry, accessed 29 Jul 2014).

At best, then, this little book can be seen as a period piece.  Perhaps it
might interest some present-day Hebraists as a vignette of a long-vanished
state of scholarship, but it is not easy to see why it should have been
reprinted now.  Cambridge University Press may have calculated that the title
combined with its imprint would ensure that any serious academic library will
feel bound to buy a copy, so that reprinting would yield useful revenue in
return for minimal outlay.  I hope that is unduly cynical, but no alternative
explanation occurs to me.

REFERENCES

Brown, F. (ed.).  1906.  A Hebrew and English lexicon of the Old Testament. 
Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Emerton, J.A.  1991.  The work of David Winton Thomas as a Hebrew scholar. 
Vetus Testamentum 41.287–303.

Hackett, J.A. and J. Huehnergard.  2008.  On revising and updating BDB.  J.
Dyk and W.Th. van Peursen (eds), Foundations for Syriac lexicography III:
Colloquia of the International Syriac Language Project, 227–33.  Piscataway,
N.J.: Gorgias.

Leander, P.  1920.  Einige hebräische Lautgesetze chronologisch geordnet. 
Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft 74.61–76.

Niccacci, A.  1994.  On the Hebrew verbal system.  R.D. Bergen (ed.), Biblical
Hebrew and discourse linguistics, 117–37.  Dallas, Tex.: Summer Institute of
Linguistics.

Rainey, A.  2008.  Shasu or Habiru: who were the early Israelites?  Biblical
Archeology Review 34.51–5.

ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Geoffrey Sampson MA, PhD (Cambridge), FBCS, Professor Emeritus, is a Research
Fellow in linguistics at the University of South Africa, having retired from
the Sussex University School of Informatics in 2009.  His books and articles
have contributed to most areas of linguistics, and also include works on
statistics, computer science, political thought, and ancient Chinese poetry. 
His most recent book is 'Grammar Without Grammaticality' (with Anna Babarczy),
de Gruyter, 2014.  Homepage:  <www.grsampson.net>.

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