Politeness Strategies in Biblical Hebrew and West African Languages

What it is about

Not read: the PDF could not be fetched. From the title and the author's known work on Hebrew politeness: the paper compares how Biblical Hebrew softens requests and shows deference — self-abasing "your servant" for "I", "my lord" for "you", the particle נָא, formulas like "if I have found favour in your eyes", third-person address of a superior — with strategies in West African languages, to help translators render them naturally. It likely uses Brown and Levinson's face theory. Check against the text.

Ideas

• I1. (to check) A politeness lexicon for the pragmatics rules: עַבְדְּךָ / עַבְדֶּךָ (speaker as "your servant"), אֲדֹנִי (addressee as "my lord"), נָא, אִם־נָא מָצָאתִי חֵן בְּעֵינֶיךָ, בִּי אֲדֹנִי; a quote with any of them gets hedge = polite.
• I2. (to check) Third-person self-reference: when "your servant" is the subject of a 3rd-person verb inside a quote, resolve it to the speaker (first person) in the event reader.
• I3. Count these markers per speaker pair in Genesis (Abraham–Hittites, Jacob–Esau, Joseph's brothers–Joseph) to show who defers to whom.

For Mova

I1 refines the hedge column of tools/macula/src/prag.rs; I2 applies to coreference in quotes; I3 is a worked example for Discourse: narrative, speech and the shape of a text §12 (politeness and address). Re-read once the PDF is in.

Cite

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.54395/jot-t933r

@article{warrenrothlin2007politeness,
  title = {{Politeness Strategies in Biblical Hebrew and West African Languages}},
  author = {Warren-Rothlin, Andy},
  journal = {Journal of Translation},
  year = {2007},
  doi = {10.54395/jot-t933r},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.54395/jot-t933r}
}

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