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openscriptures / morphhb

Open Scriptures Hebrew Bible
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Pentateuchal pronouns #15

Closed peterdanielmyers closed 10 years ago

peterdanielmyers commented 10 years ago

How are we tagging those pronouns in the Pentateuch that are masculine consonantally but pointed as feminine?

They're not a normal Ketiv/Qere. In my view they probably represent some small collapse of the gender system, perhaps due to contact with another language. So, if I were in an idiosyncratic mood I'd tag them as "common" or "both" gender.

But, since I'm not in an idiosyncratic mood, I'll tag them by grammatical gender.

yaaqov commented 10 years ago

Feminine. The orthography is "defective" and/or archaic, but it is not a neutral gender, nor has it been ever treated as such in pre-Massoretic translations.

On Mon, Apr 14, 2014 at 6:41 PM, peterdanielmyers notifications@github.comwrote:

How are we tagging those pronouns in the Pentateuch that are masculine consonantally but pointed as feminine?

They're not a normal Ketiv/Qere. In my view they probably represent some small collapse of the gender system, perhaps due to contact with another language. So, if I were in an idiosyncratic mood I'd tag them as "common" or "both" gender.

But, since I'm not in an idiosyncratic mood, I'll tag them by grammatical gender.

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHubhttps://github.com/openscriptures/morphhb/issues/15 .

peterdanielmyers commented 10 years ago

It's not defective. I would reserve that term for when matres lectionis are missing.

The versions don't treat the personal pronoun as neuter, that is correct, but in Greek you wouldn't want to render a personal pronoun in neuter if it had a personal referent. Noun classes is one of those things that you can't consistently render in translation anyway. If a particular noun belongs to one class in Hebrew, but another class in Greek, the translator just has to render it in the target language.

One of the theories for this phenomenon is that through language contact with another language that doesn't inflect pronouns for gender, the Pentateuch represents a time and place in Hebrew where the gender of the pronoun also began to collapse.

dowens76 commented 10 years ago

I think this is one issue that we will need to revisit. Actually, gender in general is one we will need to revisit. But I suggest moving this discussion to the email list rather than as an issue.