An overview of recent developments in the description of Biblical Hebrew relevant to Bible translation

Describing the system of an ancient language like Biblical Hebrew is an enormous challenge. Biblical Hebrew scholars through the years concentrated on the formal features of limited data at their disposal. However, a new paradigm in the study of language has provided a fresh perspective on aspects of language that was up till now either not fully appreciated, misunderstood or not even noticed. Improved models of what people do with language, and which include the social, cognitive and cultural aspects of language, now provide explanations for linguistic expressions that translators up till now believed they may or should leave untranslated. These models, among other things, have shown that texts are more than strings of clauses, each with their own propositional content. There are a variety of linguistic signs that have no referential meaning or syntactic function, but act as overt navigation signals for the way in which the information is supposed to be processed. These signals do not only invoke a relationship between the clauses, or clusters of clauses, contained in a text, but may also involve the entire cognitive worlds of all the participants of the communicative situation. These developments may shed new light on the interpretation and translation of the Biblical text. (Acta Theologica, Supplementum 2, 2002: 228-245

Introduction: contemporary translation studies and Bible translation

(Acta Theologica, Supplementum 2, 2002: 1-5

And mirativity in Biblical Hebrew

This exhaustive study of modifies the findings of an earlier pilot study of the lexeme. 1 Three major categories of use are distinguished, namely, 1) when within in a speech situation points out an entity, location, or event to an addressee; 2) when a narrator (and less often a speaker) uses to point to the cognitive effects of an observation or mental consideration upon another character (or, less often, upon the speaker him-/herself); and 3) when points to a proposition (or propositions) which need(s) to be related to another proposition (or propositions) or speech act(s). In each of the three categories has a deictic function, which could be regarded as its semantic core. However, since in about two-thirds of the occurrences in the corpus, it is unambiguously clear that is used to point to something for which either addressees or characters were not prepared, it is postulated the most typical and central use of is to mark mirativity. However, some secondary shifts away from this core mirative sense have been identified in the corpus. Each of the shifts is to be accounted for in a principled manner