New Resources Available

August 14, 2015 by

Greetings!

We are excited to announce that we have made three updates to the resources we have available for Beginning Biblical Hebrew.

First, our original lesson plans have been expanded to cover fifteen weeks, including all the lessons and readings from the grammar.

Next, a second set of sample lesson plans is now available. The first set is designed around a schedule of three 55-minute sessions per week for fifteen weeks and covers the entire grammar. The second set is designed around two 75-minute sessions per week for thirteen weeks, covering only through lesson 44. (This represents the practice at Asbury Theological Seminary, where lessons 45–50 and readings 11–13 are covered in the second semester.) Please email us at eSources@BakerAcademic.com if you would like the new and updated lesson plans.

Finally, all the available vocabulary flash cards on Quizlet now have Hebrew audio. Students can hear the Hebrew word read aloud and repeat the audio as many times as needed to learn the pronunciation. The flash cards can be found [here]( https://quizlet.com/BakerAcademic/folders/beginning-biblical-hebrew-readings-john-cook-rob-holmstedt).

Filed Under: Course Design, Pedagogy

The Participle

May 2, 2014 by

A recent question was sent our way: Why do we introduce the Participle so late in our textbook (lesson 42)?

One might be tempted to think that our rationale was simply that not everything can be first. However, there is a specific strategy to presenting the Participle much later than the Perfect and Imperfect forms (lessons 16, 19, 23, and 27). The relatively late introduction is especially noticeable if one compares our grammar with Modern Hebrew grammars, which tend to introduce the Participle prior to the Perfect and Imperfect conjugations. This contrast is significant, since the predicative Participle is thought of as the typical present-tense verb in Modern Hebrew grammar.

By contrast, although the Participle regularly expresses progressive aspect in Biblical, it is neither fully integrated in the verbal “system” of oppositions nor limited to predicatively expressing progressive aspect. Rather, it is properly classified as an adjective (see John A. Cook, “The Participle and Stative in Typological Perspective,” Journal of Northwest Semitic Languages 34/1 [2008]: 1–19), a lexical class that some linguists simply define in the negative as neither noun nor verb (e.g., Mark C. Baker, Lexical Categories: Verbs, Nouns, and Adjectives, Cambridge Studies in Linguistics 102 [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003]).

As neither nouns nor verbs, adjectives may exhibit varying degrees of features like one or the other: the most productive classes of adjectives (e.g., qāṭol pattern גָּדוֹל) is very noun-like, whereas the stative adjective is very verb-like (i.e., they can be inflected nominally or verbally). The Participle stands between these extremes, participating in the binyanim system but being inflected with nominal agreement features. Most importantly, however, for our placement of the Participle in lesson 42, its participation in the system of verbal oppositions is only partial and emerging in the biblical period of the language. Thus, as a marginal “verbal” conjugation, it makes sense that it is taught only after grammatical components closer to the core.

Filed Under: Morphology, Pedagogy, Syntax

Silent and vocal shəva

October 15, 2013 by

Here’s a question that was recently sent to us regarding our treatment of the shəva (see Lesson 3 specifically).

Question

In the text book, it says that a shəva is vocal only if it appears at the beginning of a word, or if it is the second of two consecutive shəvas. In any other circumstance it is silent. However, that would seem to mean that a shəva following a long vowel (in a qal pft 3fs verb, for example) would be silent. My understanding is that a shəva after a long vowel is vocal.

 

Answer

Two related principles form the background of our teaching on the shəva.

First, we hesitate to provide full descriptions of complex issues in an introductory textbook. There are some ambiguities concerning where the shəva is vocal. For example, modern textbooks will often call it a vowel when it represents what historically was a vowel that has been reduced (e.g., in the 3fs perfect form, כָּתְבָה /kɔt’əvɔ/ ‘she wrote’) or when it follows a “long” vowel. But the Masoretes were not historical linguists in the sense of modern comparative-historical Semitics. And so, as Joshua Blau notes in his Phonology and Morphology of Biblical Hebrew (LSAWS 2; Eisenbrauns 2010),

Since the pronunciation of the Bible text as regards the alternation of an ultra-short vowel and zero largely depended on the reader, and even the same reader would have varied in articulation in accordance with changing circumstances, the presentation of an archetype of the biblical text differentiating the two kinds of šwa was not feasible. Therefore, the Masoretes did the only thing possible: they marked both kinds of šwa with the same sign. (113-14)

Certainly, the other indicator that the shəva may be vocal in כָּתְבָה is that the ב lacks a dagesh, i.e., is spirantized (which implies a vowel sound preceding it). But this is not a perfect indicator, either, since the כ in מַלְכֵי also lacks a dagesh but we never consider the preceding shəva vocal in that word. So Blau suggests that the Masoretic signal that the qameṣ in כָּתְבָה was the use of the meteg, which they used to mark both secondary word stress and that the syllable was open, meaning that any following shəva is vocal.

Now, this is all compelling and may make good sense to those of us who have read large portions of the Hebrew Bible and so can recognize the patterns with a minimum of effort. However, will it make any sense to first-year students?

And this brings me to our second principle behind our presentation of the shəva in the textbook: pedagogy. We had very long conversations on a multitude of issues just like this thorny shəva problem: the two questions we tried to balance were 1) how do we present the grammar and accurately, and 2) how do we present the grammar simply and clearly for beginning students.

In many cases, we freely admit that we present a simplified view of Hebrew grammar because we determined that this is pedagogically justified. We believe that this is acceptable because 1) the students will learn the language more quickly if we do not burden them we cumbersome rules and complex descriptions (we focus on teaching language for use, not grammar for analysis in this textbook), and 2) they will learn the nuances in later years of Hebrew instruction.

We hope this clarifies our choice, as well as perhaps some of the complexities of the shəva.

Filed Under: Pedagogy, Phonology