Prolegomena for the Sociolinguistics of Classical Hebrew

What it is about

A programmatic essay: Classical Hebrew is known only in writing, so formal (generative) methods built on speech and intuition fit it badly; it should be studied as a social product of scribes, institutions and ideologies. Writing is conservative and can invent archaisms; spelling choices often signal identity rather than sound (Old Aramaic ʾrq → ʾrʿ versus Hebrew ʾrṣ). Schniedewind lists social events that should leave traces in the language: Assyrian conquest (Akkadian loanwords from the late 8th century), Persian Aramaic administration, Hasmonean nationalism. He argues that change is easiest to measure in spelling and script, then in the lexicon; syntax and the verb change slowly and are hard to date; written complexity (subordination) may grow with literacy.

Ideas

• I1. A spelling profile per book and per passage: share of plene versus defective spellings of frequent words (e.g. holem with or without waw) from the WLC text; report it next to the linguistic dating variables, as a separate, conservative signal.
• I2. A loanword layer in the Torah dictionary: tag Egyptian, Akkadian and Persian loans (from BDB's notes) so that their distribution can be counted by book.
• I3. Measure subordination density (subordinate clauses per 100 clauses: advcl, acl:relcl, ccomp) per book and genre in the trees, as Schniedewind's literacy gauge.
• I4. A note in the grammar that our data is a written, scribal register; spoken features cannot be read off it directly.

For Mova

I1 and I3 are measures on the Torah trees (tools/macula); I2 is a column in macula dict; I1–I4 go into 12. Biblical, Mishnaic and Modern Hebrew compared (stages, dating) and 10-lexicon.md (loanwords).

Cite

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.5508/jhs.2004.v5.a6

@article{schniedewind2005prolegomena,
  title = {{Prolegomena for the Sociolinguistics of Classical Hebrew}},
  author = {Schniedewind, William M.},
  journal = {Journal of Hebrew Scriptures 5},
  year = {2005},
  doi = {10.5508/jhs.2004.v5.a6},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.5508/jhs.2004.v5.a6}
}

References

4 references, 0 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

1. Press, 1977); The Logic of Writing and the Organization of Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); W. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (Padstow, Cornwall: T. J. Press, 1982); “Writing is a Technology That Restructures Thought,” in The Written Word: Literacy in Transition (ed. Gerd Baumann; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), pp. 23-50. find
2. For the distinction between illiterate and non-literate see B. Holbek, “What the Illiterate Think of Writing,” in Literacy and Society (eds. K. Schousboe and M. Larsen; Copenhagen: Akademisk Forlag, 1989), pp. 183-96. find
3. Bloomfield, Language, p. 291. Bloomfield, Language, p. 292. Schniedewind, “Qumran Hebrew as an Antilanguage,” JBL 118 (1999), pp. 235-252; and, “Linguistic Ideology in Qumran Hebrew,” in Diggers At the Well: Proceedings of a Third International Symposium on the Hebrew of the Dead Sea Scrolls and Ben Sira (ed. T. find
4. Muraoka and J. F. Elwolde; Leiden: Brill, 2000), pp. 245-255. Also see J. Joosten, find

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