Whorf and coordinates in the Bible

[Olga Meerson]

Thank you, Brad, the article is beautiful. I think, however, it is important to restore the good name of Whorf. As for words, he may be all wrong, but grammatical systems do affect us--not necessarily by constraining but philosophically, by what we consider to be our priorities. Biblical Hebrew -- unlike the modern -- indeed thinks in the terms of aspects rather than tenses. This makes all the debates, superimposed later, on the Bible's historical inaccuracies (such as Evolutionism vs. Creationism and all such nonsense) completely irrelevant for understanding the true mentality of the authors, as well as the readers (the proper readers, that is, as we also should be, in order to understand it) of the Bible. Another important feature of Biblical Hebrew actually should take into account the difference between Modern Hebrew and Biblical: sometimes, what used to designate time (olam=eternity) now designates space (olam=the universe), and sometimes the same thing used to designat!
 e !
both: qedem, like qodem and interchangeably with it, used to mean both before and the east [!!!], and now it has separated into qedem, meaning the east, and qodem, meaning before. These, to us, are merely mild precursors of einstein, but to the mentality self evident for the writers and the readers of the Bible, these were the given and the self-evident. In Jakobson's terms, the Biblical authors, before the Masoretic vocalization, were not OBLIGED to tell their readers whether they spoke of time or space-- the dimensions were that close in some cases! The same goes for other notions of phonetics distinction but not the graphemic (Hebrew, before the straightjacketing of the Masoret codification, capitalized on homographs) between passive and active forms of verbs. A good example is the name of the place of the Aqedah--the sacrifice of Isaak. "God will see" (Adonai yir'eh) and "God will be seen (Adonai yirAeh") are used interchangeably! This goes into future mentalities way be!
 yo!
nd Einstein, or rather way before (although also much after the Bible itself!)--into Nicholas of Cusa who, in "de icone/visione Dei", claimed that in order to see God, we have to contemplate Him as seeing us. All this concerns me because of my latest book, on characters' subjective points of view as "egocentric coordinates" in fiction. I did not use any of these examples, though, oddly enough. This may go to prove that the topic is in the air, everywhere, and of true importance, way beyond my personal, "egocentric" interests!
o.m.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------
 Use your web browser to search the archives, control your subscription
  options, and more.  Visit and bookmark the SEELANGS Web Interface at:
                    http://seelangs.home.comcast.net/
-------------------------------------------------------------------------