29.689, Review: Ancient Hebrew; Semitic; Historical Linguistics: Juhás (2017)

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Subject: 29.689, Review: Ancient Hebrew; Semitic; Historical Linguistics: Juhás (2017)

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Date: Mon, 12 Feb 2018 15:02:33
From: Geoffrey Sampson [sampson at cantab.net]
Subject: Die biblisch-hebräische Partikel נָא im Lichte der antiken Bibelübersetzungen

 
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Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/28/28-1783.html

AUTHOR: Peter  Juhás
TITLE: Die biblisch-hebräische Partikel נָא im Lichte der antiken Bibelübersetzungen
SUBTITLE: Unter besonderer Berücksichtigung ihrer vermuteten Höflichkeitsfunktion
SERIES TITLE: Studia Semitica Neerlandica
PUBLISHER: Brill
YEAR: 2017

REVIEWER: Geoffrey Sampson, University of Sussex

REVIEWS EDITOR: Helen Aristar-Dry

SUMMARY

The title and subtitle of this book translate as ''The Biblical Hebrew
particle na' in the light of ancient Bible translations, with special
reference to its supposed function of politeness''.  Hebrew na' is a suffix,
commonly described as expressing ''entreaty'' and sometimes translated
'please', which is frequent in the Hebrew Bible (more than 400 instances);
words to which it is suffixed are often imperative forms of verbs, but it can
occur with other verb forms or with words that are not verbs.  Europeans
encounter this particle in the word ''hosanna'', which is a Greekified
spelling of Hebrew hoshagh-na', suffixing the particle to an imperative form
of a derivate of the root j-sh-gh that means 'save'.  (For the Hebrew
transcription system used here see http://www.grsampson.net/SHebTrans.pdf.)

There has been much debate about just what force na' had in Biblical times. 
Juhás's approach in this book, which is a version of a Leiden University
thesis, is to examine the question by seeing how the suffix was rendered in
the three most significant early translations of the Bible, namely (with
respective target language and likely translation date):

    Septuagint, Greek, 3rd century BC

    Peshitta, Syriac (which was a variety of Aramaic that became the language
of the Nestorian Church), 2nd–3rd century AD

    Vulgate, Latin, about AD 400

Chapter 1 of the book analyses the concepts of politeness and rudeness in
language, with particular attention to the work of Brown and Levinson (1987). 
Juhás points out that Biblical Hebrew lacked a word for 'polite' – the words
used to express the concept in modern Israeli Hebrew are based on loans from
Greek and Arabic.  (However, if Juhás believes that a language which lacks
vocabulary for a concept must be a language which does not encode that concept
grammatically, this is not an idea that he makes explicit.)

Chapter 2 discusses how discourse particles can be used to express the various
senses attributed by different scholars to na'.

Chapter 3 describes the three Bible translations.  Juhás points out that the
Hebrew manuscripts from which they were prepared clearly differed in some
respects (the Masoretic text which is now standard was redacted only many
centuries after the latest of the translations studied).  And the translations
differ also in the extent to which they aimed at literal word-for-word
equivalence rather than prose which read naturally in the target language. 
The Septuagint was produced over a long period during which the translators'
practice shifted from semantic fidelity towards word-for-word rendering,
whereas St Jerome, translator of the Vulgate, produced an output which was
''halfway between the Ciceronian prose of his own epistles and the laborious
word-for-word style'' (quoting Bogaert 2013).

Juhás notes that the respective target languages differed greatly in how far
they contained discourse particles which might be used to render the subtle
force of these particles in another language.  Greek was particularly rich in
this respect, while Syriac and Latin had few discourse particles.

Chapter 4 examines the history of scholarly attempts to gloss na'.  For Johann
Reuchlin, a 15th–16th c. pioneer of Christian Hebrew studies, and for Wilhelm
Gesenius, author of the early-19th c. standard grammar of Hebrew, na' was a
polyvalent form, used for 'please' but also for emphasis, to express caution,
etc.  Later scholars sometimes treated the form as having a single function
which was something other than entreaty.  For Thomas Lambdin it expressed
logical consequence, like English 'so'.  For M. Bar-Magen the form stood for a
nasal prolongation of the preceding word which functioned to draw that word to
the hearer's attention.  But in the last twenty years a series of Hebraists
have in effect claimed that na' is always a politeness marker.  It is this
last view which Juhás aims to challenge.  Juhás believes the form was
polyvalent.  His concept of its diverse functions draws on a theory about
multiple ''discourse levels'', connected with work by Caroline Kroon (1995)
and others, but it seems fair to say that his book is concerned more to argue
against na' as always a politeness marker than to develop the discourse level
theory in detail.

Chapter 4 also examines possible cognates of na' in other Semitic languages. 
It has often been linked to the so-called energic inflexional category in
Arabic.  (I have no Arabic, but I have seen the energic glossed as comparable
to English ''I do like you'' as opposed to plain ''I like you''.)  Juhás is
sceptical about this.  The only clear cognate he identifies is a form in
Hatrani (a now-dead variety of Aramaic); in a later chapter he also concludes
that it is probably cognate with a Syriac form written <n'> in the vowel-less
Syriac alphabet (though alternatively this might be a loan from Hebrew, and,
interestingly, Hebrew na' is rarely reflected by <n'> in the Peshitta).

Chapters 5, 6, and 7 study, instance by instance, the choices made by the
three Bible translations in rendering na' (including the choice of leaving it
untranslated).  Chapter 5 covers the narrative books, from Genesis to
Chronicles; Chapter 6 the ''non-prophetic poetic books'' (Psalms, Job); and
Chapter 7 the prophetic books, particularly Isaiah and Jeremiah.  Juhás notes
that the incidence of na' is very different in different books:  it is
completely absent from the books of law (Leviticus, Deuteronomy), and after
the Babylonian Exile (about 600 BC) na' seems to have ceased to be part of
ordinary colloquial speech, perhaps being confined to poetic or liturgical
registers.  In Chronicles it occurs only in speech by David and other royal
figures.

At various points Juhás claims that it is implausible to see given instances
of na' as expressing politeness.  At I Chronicles 22:5, for instance, David is
thinking aloud (akina nna' lo, rendered by the New English Bible as ''...
therefore I must make preparations for it myself'', taking na' = 'therefore').
 We are not normally polite to ourselves.  Or at Judges 16:28 Samson begs God
for one last access of strength to pull down the pillars of the temple, thus
killing the Philistines and himself:  Adonaj JHWH zakreni na' wchazzqeni na'
ak happagham hazze, ''Remember me, O Lord GOD, remember me:  give me strength
only this once''.  Juhás is surely correct to say that in our final extremity
we omit politeness.  (A drowning man shouts ''Help!'', not ''Please help''.)

A brief concluding chapter sums up Juhás's quarrel with the idea that na'
always expresses politeness.  The particle cannot always be translated in one
consistent way, he believes, and he sees its ''basic meaning'' as linked not
with politeness but with ''attentionality'' and perhaps ''emotionality''.

EVALUATION

Juhás has been admirably careful and thorough in executing the task he
undertook.  Anyone wishing to contribute to the na' debate in future could do
well to use this book as a starting point.  Apart from Juhás's examination of
how the particle was rendered in other languages, his detailed tables of
occurrences in various parts of the Hebrew Bible, and his coverage of the
history of the debate, make the book an excellent basis for studying the
issue.  More generally, the book holds much interest for any scholar concerned
with the problems of translating ancient languages.

Nevertheless, I am sceptical about whether Juhás has given us the final word
on na'.

One assumption which, it seems to me, Juhás never adequately justifies is that
early Bible translations embodied authoritative insights into the force of na'
in the original Hebrew.  Unless we accept that, the value of the exercise is
questionable.  The early translations are much closer in time to the original
than are the scholars discussed in Chapter 4.  But closeness in time may not
be significant; arguably, what matters is whether the translators had access
to Hebrew as a living spoken language in which na' continued to function as it
did in the Bible.  The Vulgate was produced some two centuries after Hebrew
had ceased to be a spoken language.  And if, as Juhás suggests, the usage of
na' was limited and altered after the Exile, then Peshitta and even Septuagint
were compiled without first-hand experience of the form as it was used in the
earlier, more central books.

One might suppose that, even after Hebrew became a learnèd written language
only, there could have been traditions about word usage which the early
translators were aware of but which later died out, so that modern scholars do
not know them.  However, when the form in question is a discourse particle
whose meaning(s) is/are abstract and tied to the spoken medium (rather than,
say, a name for a concrete object), I find that implausible.  I cannot imagine
how such a tradition could be maintained by people whose own mother tongues
did not encode the same abstract sense.

Consider, for instance, what Juhás says in the very last sentence of his book.
 If we want to identify a close equivalent to na' in a modern European
language, a good approximation (he suggests) would be German 'doch' (in its
role as discourse particle, not as an interjection contradicting a negative
assertion).  English has no close equivalent.  My German is reasonable and
when I hear a German use 'doch' I feel intuitively that I understand what he
is doing with the word; but I would be very hard put to express that verbally
so as to explain it to a non-German speaker.  Yet German is a widely-spoken
living language.  How could this type of knowledge be maintained over
centuries when there was no continuing possibility of checking against
native-speaker behaviour?

>From this point of view one might think that modern scholarship, which at
least draws on wide experience of exotic languages and on sophisticated
logical and linguistic analysis, is likely to be better placed than early
translators to infer from context what na' meant.

Another problem is that it is difficult to use context to establish the force
of an instance of na', if the meaning of the context is itself unclear.  For
instance, one passage that Juhás cites more than once in order to argue that
na' cannot invariably indicate politeness is Exodus 10:11, where Moses and
Aaron have been pestering the Pharaoh to let the Israelites emigrate,
pretending that this will be a temporary absence because they are required to
sacrifice to their God Yahweh in the desert, and the Pharaoh replies Lo' ken
l'ku-na' hagg'barim wghib'du et-JHWH, where na' is suffixed to the masc. pl.
imperative of h-l-k 'go'.  Juhás takes this as an exasperated shout of ''No! 
Get out of here, [you] men ...''.  In that case a politeness marker would
indeed be out of place.  But every English Bible version I have looked at
takes it differently, along the lines ''No, let the men [alone] go ...''.  In
societies familiar to me there is nothing odd about a man of authority
choosing a polite way to decline a subordinate's request.  I am not qualified
to adjudicate between Juhás and the other learned Hebraists responsible for
the English translations, but it does seem to me that the latter
interpretation fits better with the following clause ''and serve [again
imperative] Yahweh'', and also with what precedes.

Likewise, there are a number of places where Juhás suggests that puzzling
translations may be explainable in terms of the translator working from a
Hebrew text different from any now extant.  That is clearly a possibility, but
it further reduces the value of the translations as guides to the meaning of
problematic Hebrew forms.

Lastly, I wonder whether some of the senses which Juhás attributes to
instances of na' are as incompatible with the 'please' sense as he supposes. 
At a number of places Juhás argues that instances of the particle seem to
express impatience, anger, or sarcasm.  These concepts are certainly different
from politeness.  But then, in English people often say ''Oh, please!'' in an
impatient or sarcastic way, and it seems to me that this does not make
'please' an ambiguous English word – it is because of the basic, polite sense
of 'please' that it works as an expression of impatience or sarcasm.  Is it
unreasonably Anglocentric to think that the same could have been true in
Hebrew?

The book has been superbly well produced by the publisher.  It must have been
challenging to print, containing as it does frequent inline quotations in
Greek, pointed Hebrew, and Syriac alphabets, and some in Ethiopic and Coptic
scripts.  Because typographic features such as italics or bold face do not
apply to some of these scripts, keywords are picked out in red, which I
imagine considerably increased production costs.  I did not spot a single
misprint, which is rare even for books that pose fewer printing difficulties. 
I would only remark that the indexing has not been perfectly done; I could not
find an explanation of the reference ''Ber 9a'' (p. 37) in the tables of
abbreviations, and Thomas Lambdin's name is missing from the author index.

REFERENCES

Bogaert, Pierre-Maurice.  2013.  ''The Latin Bible''.  In James Paget and
Joachim Schaper, eds, New Cambridge history of the Bible: from the beginnings
to 600.  Cambridge University Press.

Brown, Penelope and Stephen Levinson.  1987.  Politeness: some universals in
language use.  Cambridge University Press.

Kroon, Caroline.  1995.  Discourse particles in Latin.  Brill (Amsterdam).


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Geoffrey Sampson graduated in Chinese Studies from Cambridge University, and
his academic career was spent partly in Linguistics and partly in Informatics,
with intervals in industrial research. After retiring as professor emeritus
from Sussex University in 2009, he spent several years as Research Fellow at
the University of South Africa. He has published contributions to most areas
of Linguistics, as well as to other subjects. His latest book is ''The
Delusion of Linguistics'' (2017).





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