Issues in the Linguistic Analysis of a Dead Language, with Particular Reference to Ancient Hebrew

What it is about

A method essay. Holmstedt separates linguistics (explaining the language system) from philology (understanding texts) and argues they need each other. A dead language gives no native speakers and no negative evidence, so the analyst must accept two working principles: nearly all attested data is grammatical and felicitous in context, and a theory tested on living languages serves as the interpretive filter. Reconstructing unattested clauses (e.g. a main-clause version of the verb–object–subject order inside the relative clause of Gen 6:22) is legitimate only with care. He rejects Schniedewind's claim that formal linguistics cannot apply to written languages, discusses whether "Biblical Hebrew" is one language or several (diglossia, dialects, idiolects), and says that Israeli Hebrew syntax should not be excluded a priori as comparative evidence.

Ideas

I1. Mark grammar statements in three grades: attested (with count), unattested but predicted by a rule, and excluded (never attested where expected, with the number of chances); never write "ungrammatical" for ancient Hebrew without the chances count.
I2. Compare word order in relative clauses (after אֲשֶׁר) with main clauses in the Torah trees: share of V–S, V–O–S and S–V in each; Holmstedt's Gen 6:22 suggests relatives preserve verb-first order.
I3. Keep the corpus of examples apart from the rules: rules are checked on held-out books (e.g. derive on Genesis–Leviticus, test on Numbers–Deuteronomy), since no informant can test them.
I4. A short section on using Modern Hebrew (and Mishnaic) only as a source of hypotheses for syntax and the verb, never for lexical meaning.

For Mova

I1 and I4 are conventions for languages/hbo/ (README "Numbers" and chapter 12); I2 is a measure for 08-syntax.md (word order, relative clauses) on tools/macula trees; I3 applies to any rule added to tools/macula or src/prag.rs.

Cite

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.5508/jhs.2006.v6.a11

@article{holmstedt2006issues,
  title = {{Issues in the Linguistic Analysis of a Dead Language, with Particular Reference to Ancient Hebrew}},
  author = {Holmstedt, Robert},
  journal = {Journal of Hebrew Scriptures 6},
  year = {2006},
  doi = {10.5508/jhs.2006.v6.a11},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.5508/jhs.2006.v6.a11}
}

References

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

Focus Structure in Biblical Hebrew: A Study of Word Order and Information Structure)” (Hebrew Studies 44[2003]:203-15; idem, “Word Order in the Book of Proverbs” (Pp. 135-54 in Seeking Out the Wisdom of the Ancients: Essays Offered to Honor Michael V. Fox on the Occasion of His Sixty-Fifth Birthday, ed. K.G. Friebel, D.R. Magary and R.L. Troxel; Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2005). 5 K. Koerner, “Linguistics vs Philology: Self-Definition of a Field or Rhetorical Stance?” (Language Sciences 19 [2]:167-175), p. 168. find
“neue Philologie.” 6 It was not until the next generation that August Schleicher (1821-1868) argued for a sharp distinction between Philologie and Linguistik. For Schleicher, philology was an historical inquiry, using language as a vehicle in the study of culture; in contrast, he asserted that linguistics was the scientific investigation of language itself. 7 While Schleicher agreed that quite often the linguist and philologist need each other, he envisioned the two to have two distinct objects of investigation: “In contrast to a philologist, who could work on the basis of the knowledge of only one language (e.g. Greek), a linguist, in Schleicher’s view (1850:4) needs to know many languages, to the extent that ‘Linguistik’ becomes synonymous with ‘Sprachvergleichung’ (p.5).” 8 The third generation of historical-comparative scholars, the Junggrammatiker, or “neogrammarians,” were Schleicher’s conceptual heirs; the “jung” did not have the sense of “young Turk” for nothing, though. find
It therefore seems strange to us that Berthold Delbrück in his 1880 Einleitung in das Sprachstudium [...] presents Schleicher ‘in the essence of his being’ as a philologist, since thirty years before it had been Schleicher (and no one else) who had clearly set off his work from those of the (classical) philologists. However, if one remembers the ‘eclipsing stance’ which the Young Turks at the University of Leipzig and elsewhere in Germany took vis-à-vis their elders from the mid-1870s to the mid-1880s, one might not be surprised that Delbrück (1842-1922) distorted the facts to suit his argument, namely that the junggrammatische Richtung represented ‘new endeavors’ [...] rather than a continuation of research along established lines. 9 find
Thus the association of philology with “older” historical-comparative study and “linguistics” with “newer” methods does not reflect the earliest uses of the terms (i.e., Schleicher’s), but it was a stance adopted soon thereafter, and it was often taken with a dismissive attitude towards philology. That the eclipsing stance towards philology continued well into the twentieth century is represented well by Geoffrey Sampson’s brief definition in his history of linguistics: “in modern English usage linguistics normally means linguistics in the twentieth-century style— therefore primarily synchronic linguistics—while philology, if used at all refers . . . to historical linguistics as practised in the nineteenth century.” 10 Unfortunately this approach has been appropriated into ancient Hebrew studies. James Barr, in his 1969 article on the find
Ibid. In this quote, Koerner references the introductory chapter, “Linguistik und Philologie,” in Schleicher’s 1850 work Die Sprachen Europas in systematischer Uebersicht (Bonn: König; reprinted with introduction by K. Koe rner; Amsterd am: John Benjamins, 1983). 9 Ibid, p. 171. 10 G. Sampson, Schools of Linguistics (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1980), p. 243, n. 1. interaction between the two disciplines in our field, defines the two terms in just this way. 11 Thankfully, every couple generations of language research the conversation arises about what philology and linguistics concern and how the two relate, and since the 1970s there appears to have been a slow shift back to the view that the two activities may have a productive relationship. In this spirit, I think there are two equally tenable approaches that we can take, one that takes philology as a tool in the use of linguistics, and one that sets the two on equal footing but with different objects of study. The first approach takes philology as the study of written records in order to retrieve linguistic information. 12 Thus, Lyle Campbell writes in his introduction to historical linguistics, In the use of philology for historical linguistic purposes, we are concerned with what linguistic information can be obtained from written documents, with how we can get it, and with what we can make of the information once we have it. The philological investigation of older written attestations can contribute in several ways, for example, by documenting sound changes, distinguishing inherited from borrowed material, dating changes and borrowings, and helping to understand the development and change in writing systems and orthographic conventions. 13 find
Thus it is that Konrad Ehlich can assert philology to be a subsidiary discipline: it is the sometimes necessary handmaiden of linguistics.14 When an old or difficult text must be read, call in the philologist! Undoubtedly this is a legitimate approach, since philology is closely associated with each of the tasks that Campbell describes above. But there is a framework in which the relationship between philology and linguistics is neither chronological nor hierarchical, viz. they differ only in their specific objects of investigation. Consider how H. A. Gleason delineates the two activities: “Linguistics, at least potentially, deals with those things which are common to all texts in a given language, whereas philology deals with those things which are peculiar to specific texts.” 15 11 So J. Barr, “The Ancient Semitic Languages—The Conflict between Philology and Linguistics” (in Transactions of the Philological Society 1968; Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1969), pp. 37-55, especially p. 37. 12 Although less common among linguists, there still exists the broader definition of philology as the study of texts in order to interpret them and their cultural setting (so P. Daniels, “Writing Systems” (pp. 43-80 in The Handbook of Linguistics, ed. M. Aronoff and J. Rees-Miller; Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), p. 76. 13 L. Campbell, Historical Linguistics: An Introduction. 2nd Ed. (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004), p. 362. 14 K. Ehlich, “Native Speaker’s Heritage: On Philology of ‘Dead’ Languages” (in A Festschrift for Native Speaker; ed. F. Coulmas; The Hague: Mouton Publishers, 1981), pp. 153-165. 15 H. A. Gleason, “Linguistics and Philology” (in On Language, Culture, and Religion: In Honor of Eugene A. Nida , ed. M. Black and W. A. Smalley, Jr.; The Hague: Mouton, 1974), pp. 199-212, quote from p. 200. find

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