Friday, October 22, 2010

Why I'm afraid to learn Hebrew.

I'd totally get hung up on the vowel points. I totally don't get how you can have ancient unvowelled manuscripts and then vowel points attested much later, and then "just read" the manuscript and not worry about that. I'm too linguistically neurotic/anal, I think.
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2 comments:

Anonymous said...

All I can say is :)
-L

October 31, 2010 at 9:04 AM
Anonymous said...

PS. At least with Hebrew proper there are grammatical rules that allow you to vocalize large portions of a text almost mechasnically. Imagine my frustration as a linguist with a 15th century unvocallized manuscript from the Cairo Genizah in Judeo-Spanish....:) "Hmm, 'CTLG'... could it be 'catalogue' or 'cytology'...:)"

October 31, 2010 at 9:09 AM

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