Time in Ancient Hebrew Lexicon: The Case of yrḥ and ḥdš
What it is about
A structural-semantic study (Coseriu's lexematics, as applied to Hebrew by Zatelli and Vivian) of two words for "month": חֹדֶשׁ and יֶרַח. The Bible is split into "functional languages" (archaic poetry, early narrative, early poetry, juridical-cultic, late narrative, Job, etc.), and each word is analysed in five steps: distribution, class (what kind of word it combines with), syntagms, components (semes) and paradigm. חֹדֶשׁ occurs 291 times, יֶרַח 21 (about 14:1), both mostly in narrative dating formulas. Three lexical units come out: ḥdš¹ "month" (a time unit), ḥdš² "(day of) New Moon" (a feast, in the company of שַׁבָּת, חַג, מוֹעֵד), and yrḥ "month", an interchangeable variant of ḥdš¹ that fades from early to late prose but reappears in Job. Whether yrḥ is an archaism cannot be proved from so few data. The method's point: define a word against its neighbours in the field, not in isolation as the big lexicons do.
Ideas
- I1. Split the Torah dictionary entry for חֹדֶשׁ into two senses by collocation: with an ordinal or number, or as "in the Nth month", → "month"; coordinated with שַׁבָּת/מוֹעֵד/חַג or in "head of your months" (רָאשֵׁי חָדְשֵׁיכֶם) → "new moon". Measure against the JPS rendering of each Torah occurrence.
- I2. Build a small time field for the dictionary: יוֹם, חֹדֶשׁ, יֶרַח, שָׁנָה, בֹּקֶר, עֶרֶב, עוֹלָם, with dimension tags (objective unit vs cultic vs subjective/"remote time") as features, so that date expressions can be parsed into the world.
- I3. Count each time word per genre in the Torah (narrative vs law vs poetry, from
prag's voice and the poetry passages) to reproduce the distribution table on our data.
For Mova
I1 and I2 go into the Torah dictionary (macula dict) and The lexicon (semantic fields, polysemy). I2 also feeds the world's time model: dating formulas ("in the second month, on the seventeenth day") become events with dates. I3 is a count for 10-lexicon.md.
Cite
@inproceedings{legnaioli2016time,
title = {{Time in Ancient Hebrew Lexicon: The Case of yrḥ and ḥdš}},
author = {Legnaioli, Alberto},
booktitle = {Quaderni di Linguistica e Studi Orientali},
year = {2016},
doi = {10.13128/qulso-2421-7220-18755},
url = {https://doi.org/10.13128/qulso-2421-7220-18755}
}References
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