Teach Linguistics, Not Just Dikduk (article summary)
My article for this past Shabbos in The Jewish Link was about the importance of teaching dikduk, as well as linguistic knowledge more broadly, applied to languages such as English or Italian. Students should know phonology in general so that they have the intuition and capabilities of tackling Hebrew dikduk and how a guttural differs from a sibilant. I’ll summarize the points below, but first the hyperlinks: HTML, flipdocs, paid Substack.
These are the bullet points:
(1) A joke about not killing Adam for eating from the Tree of Knowledge, despite the Divine promise. He’s just cast out of the Garden. Why? Because shlucho shel adam kemoso, sending out of Adam is like his death.
Grammarians might point out that that is shilucho, rather than shlucho. Nu, nu…
(2) This relates to Kiddushin 41, which derives agency for divorce. He can send it via agent / he can send an agent; she can receive it via agent. The agent can appoint another agent. This is deduced from וְשִׁלַּח / וְשִׁלְּחָהּ.
(3) I won’t go into the full mechanics of this interpretation. But one strong possibility to my mind is that it is the kal vs. the piel. The Biblical words are written in the piel - veshillach, which means “he sent out [/drove out]” as opposed to the kal form veshalach, “he sent [a messenger]”. I note Biblical examples of each use. So it is a revocalization.
(4) Alas, when reviewing this daf with a bright high schooler in the top shiur, where the topic was how Rishonim understood the derashot in different ways, the notes revealed that all students and the rebbe were mispronouncing the words as veshalach / veshalcha. That meant missing the possible dikduk aspect of the derasha, plus that they hadn’t bothered to look the pesukim up inside, in a Chumash!
(5) We looked at the verses inside, and this helped us understand various features mentioned in different derashot to a greater degree. E.g. what does it mean that veshillechah is written twice? Why would it be? Hey, there is a third instance! That actually helps address Tosafot’s question…
(6) So, besides actually looking at the pesukim inside, American yeshivot can do a lot better in teaching Hebrew language and grammar. Right now, for many that do, it doesn’t really “stick”.
My suggestion is therefore that they should teach grammar and linguistics more broadly. That includes a general understanding of phonology, morphology, syntax, and the different rules, features, and linguistic developments across multiple languages. Not just for Hebrew, but for English, Italian, and so on.
The problem right now is that they are taught a specific rule for Hebrew, that beged kefet at the start of a word or after a sheva nach gets a dagesh. What is special about these six letters, phonologically speaking? With a broader understanding of phonology, using scientific and English terminology (plosive vs. fricative, voiced vs. unvoiced), students will have the vessels to understand the specifics as it applies to Hebrew, and it won’t seem like arcane, arbitrary rules to remember. And they won’t shy away from the dikduk Rashis, and so on.
My column for next week dives further into the pitfalls of Talmudic Hebrew / Aramaic what could be done to address the difficulties.
So, for nominative vs. accusative, this can be described simply as "I" vs. "me". Understanding that I is used as the subject (I ate) while me is used as the object (She spoke to me) is useful for speaking English correctly. If taught as part of a general curriculum of linguistics, people could internalize it and not use the nominative case all the time when joined with another actor, like they do in all TV shows. "She spoke to Bobby and I".
When it comes to Hebrew, distinguishing between the nominative and accusative pronouns may now make more sense. After we encounter accusative case endings in languages like Turkish (Araba as nominative for car, Arabayı as accusative case), we can maybe recognize that the Hebrew word "et" is the accusative case marker. You can tell students this, and they have an English / scientific term to tap into. Instead of saying "et" appears (sometimes, not always) on the nouns that things are done to.
I don't know that knowing dikduk Rashis will help for Hebrew linguistics. But the broad knowledge will both allow people to approach the dikduk Rashis, and to approach even modern Semitic grammar.
Important topic. Comments on the following, I added numbers:
>1) But more than that, grammatical ignorance isn’t restricted to Hebrew. Ask these students if they can provide an example of an English subjunctive. Can they distinguish between the English nominative and accusative pronouns, between a sibilant and a dental or between the active and the passive?
>2) People skip the dikduk Rashis—not just because they don’t know dikduk—but because they don’t know how grammar works and lack the vocabulary to discuss it.
My comments:
1) I'm highly interested in linguistics, and I've spent probably hundreds of hours on my own studying it. And yet, I wouldn't necessarily be able to provide examples of the terms you mention. To give a coding analogy: what you describe is akin to "white-boarding". Off-hand knowledge of technical terms isn't especially important, IMO. To be more concrete, I'd say it's important to know what a pronoun is, but less important to know off-hand the difference between nominative and accusative. Those terms are just difficult to retain, and it's not realistic, nor especially important, for the average motivated individual to remember them. Of course, it is different if one is particularly interested or are currently researching that specific linguistic topic (see my recent piece on part-of-speech tagging of Talmudic text).
Ultimately, as you hint to in the end (and as with coding), what's important is "getting a feel for the language", and less so memorizing all the technical terminology. This is especially the case with the ready access nowadays to ChatGPT, Wikipedia, etc. Of course, basic knowledge is still important, I'm simply pushing back at how detailed the off-hand knowledge of specific technical terms is.
2) I haven't looked into it especially, but my understanding is that rashi's dikduk is somewhat foreign to the modern linguistic model of Hebrew (especially in terms of the modern standard model's assumption of triliteral roots, in Semitic languages; taught in all Israeli schools). So I'm not sure that understanding Rashi is a good metric for a proper grounding in Hebrew linguistics .