Beyond Barr ‐ Biblical Hebrew Semantics at its Crossroads

2021 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 19-36
Author(s):  
Carsten Ziegert
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Cognitive Linguistics ◽  
Biblical Hebrew ◽  
Frame Semantics ◽  
New Paradigm ◽  
Conceptual Metaphors ◽  
Wilhelm Von Humboldt ◽  
Survey Article ◽  
History Of ◽  
The 1960S

Summary This survey article comments on the history of biblical semantics from the beginning of the nineteenth century to the present time. This period of 200 years is divided into three phases, each of which is governed by a predominant paradigm: 1) The era of biblical philology was heavily influenced by the ideas of Wilhelm von Humboldt. 2) Linguistic structuralism was promulgated to biblical scholars by James Barr since the 1960s. 3) The present time, still dominated by structuralism, has nevertheless seen the rise of a new paradigm, namely, cognitive linguistics. Within this domain, particularly frame semantics and the theory of conceptual metaphors have the potential to bring fresh insights to biblical semantics, exegesis and theology. This development is illustrated by means of some examples from the field of biblical Hebrew.ZusammenfassungIn diesem Überblicksartikel wird die Geschichte der biblischen Semantik vom Anfang des 19. Jahrhunderts bis in die Gegenwart nachgezeichnet. Dieser Zeitraum von 200 Jahren lässt sich in drei Phasen einteilen, in denen jeweils ein Paradigma maßgeblich ist: 1) Die Epoche der biblischen Philologie war stark von den Ideen Wilhelm von Humboldts geprägt. 2) Der linguistische Strukturalismus wurde in den Bibelwissenschaften seit den 1960er Jahren durch James Barr vorherrschend. 3) In der Gegenwart, die immer noch vom Strukturalismus beherrscht wird, zeichnet sich die kognitive Linguistik als ein neues Paradigma ab. Vor allem die Frame-Semantik und die Theorie der konzeptuellen Metaphern haben das Potential, die biblische Semantik, Exegese und Theologie durch neue Erkenntnisse zu bereichern. Das wird durch einige Beispiele aus dem Bereich des biblischen Hebräisch veranschaulicht.RésuméCe survol examine l’histoire de la sémantique biblique du début du XIXe siècle à nos jours. Cette période de 200 ans comporte trois phases, chacune dominée par un paradigme différent: 1) L’époque de la philologie biblique est fortement marquée par les idées de Wilhelm von Humboldt. 2) Dans les années soixante, c’est le structuralisme linguistique de James Barr qui se répand parmi les exégètes. 3) Aujourd’hui, bien que le structuralisme ait encore l’avantage, un nouveau paradigme est né et se développe, savoir la linguistique cognitive. Dans ce domaine, la sémantique des schémas et la théorie des métaphores conceptuelles en particulier peuvent offrir tant à la sémantique biblique, qu’à l’exégèse et à la théologie des perspectives nouvelles. La preuve en est donnée par des exemples tirés du domaine de l’hébreu biblique.

What is חֶ֫סֶד‎? A frame-semantic approach

2020 ◽  
Vol 44 (4) ◽  
pp. 711-732
Author(s):  
Carsten Ziegert
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Linguistics ◽  
Biblical Hebrew ◽  
Social Knowledge ◽  
Frame Semantics ◽  
Short History ◽  
Semantic Approach ◽  
Linguistic Methodology ◽  
History Of Research ◽  
History Of

This article presents a new investigation of חסד‎, a much-discussed Biblical Hebrew lexeme. A short history of research reveals that the most influential studies of חסד‎ lack a sound linguistic methodology. Cognitive linguistics, particularly frame semantics, provides a methodology that deliberately takes cultural and social knowledge into account. The meaning of חסד‎ turns out to be an action or an event rather than an attitude. It can be described as ‘an action performed by one person for the benefit of another to avert some danger or critical impairment from the beneficiary’. This definition is then applied to some difficult passages which contain the lexeme חסד‎ including Hos. 6.6 and Isa. 40.6 and arguably produces better readings.

A Case for Grace? Case-Grammar, Frame-Semantics, and Biblical Hebrew חֵן

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-18
Author(s):  
Carsten Ziegert
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Linguistics ◽  
Biblical Hebrew ◽  
Frame Semantics ◽  
Potential Conflict ◽  
Case Grammar ◽  
Basic Meaning ◽  
Biblical Texts

Abstract The traditional rendering “grace” for חֵן is controversial. Frame semantics, a theory originating in cognitive linguistics, anticipates that prototypical situations are evoked in language users’ minds each time a word is used. Thus, a “frame” for “חֵן situations” is reconstructed from Biblical texts. Apart from the basic meaning “beauty” which is offered in dictionaries, too, an extended meaning is presented: חֵן designates “the settling of a (potential) conflict between two parties that only one party can bring to a conclusion.”

German New Lefts

2019 ◽  
Vol 46 (2) ◽  
pp. 117-149
Author(s):  
Terence Renaud
Keyword(s):  
New Left ◽  
Social Protest ◽  
West Germany ◽  
New Paradigm ◽  
Generational Conflict ◽  
German Student ◽  
The Sixties ◽  
Transnational Connections ◽  
History Of ◽  
The 1960S

AbstractThe New Left that arose in West Germany during the 1960s mimicked the antifascist reformations of the 1930s. For grassroots campaigns, extraparliamentary opposition groups, and radical student organizations of the postwar decades, the Marxist humanist theories and revolutionary socialist splinter groups of the interwar years served as attractive models. At the same time, the Sixty-eighter generation rebelled against a political establishment now represented by that earlier generation of neoleftist pioneers, their parents. But generational conflict was just the symptom of a deeper problem in the history of the midcentury Left: a succession of radical new lefts arose out of periodic frustration at institutionalized politics. This article explores the missing link between Germany’s antifascist and antiauthoritarian new lefts: the so-called left socialists of the 1950s. In particular, Ossip K. Flechtheim’s science of futurology and Wolfgang Abendroth’s theory of antagonistic society translated antifascism’s legacies into a new paradigm of social protest. The left socialists’ support for the embattled Socialist German Student League laid the organizational and intellectual foundation for the sixties New Left. Recent studies of the “global sixties” have shown the transnational connections between new lefts across space; this article explains their continuity across time.

Forest Extraction to Theme Parks: The Modern History of Land Change

2004 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Klepeis
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Land Use ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Land Change ◽  
Modern History ◽  
Human Environment ◽  
Forest Clearing ◽  
Calakmul Biosphere Reserve ◽  
History Of ◽  
The 1960S

Modern-day deforestation in the southern Yucatán peninsular region began in earnest in the late 1960s. The composition of the region’s forest and options for land uses, however, were partly shaped by eighty years of activity leading up to the 1960s, just as it was by the ancient Maya over a millennium ago (Ch. 2). Most of the modern impacts began in the twentieth century and are traced here through three major episodes of use and occupation of the region: forest extraction, 1880–1983; big projects and forest clearing, 1975–82; and land-use diversification, conservation, and tourism, 1983 to the present. Each episode corresponds to different visions of how the region should be used and to different human–environment conditions shaping the kind, location, and magnitude of land change. Understanding these changing conditions underpins all other assessments of the SYPR project. The episode of forest extraction spans the bulk of the modern history of the region. It began in the late nineteenth century and ended with the demise of parastatal logging companies in the 1970s and early 1980s, due primarily to the depletion of reserves of mahogany and Spanish cedar throughout the region. Before this episode fully expired, a new one, that of big projects and forest clearing began, marked by large-scale rice and cattle schemes undertaken in the mid to late 1970s and early 1980s. This episode accelerated the road construction that began in the latter part of the 1960s, and it witnessed expanded settlement linked to colonization programs. The Mexican debt crisis of 1982 brought this episode to an abrupt halt, triggering the search for a new alternative to developing the frontier. This search, made in the context of neoliberal economic reforms, led to the establishment of the Calakmul Biosphere Reserve in 1989 and other, more recent initiatives, defining the most recent episode of land-use diversification, conservation, and tourism. From the collapse of the Classic Maya civilization to the twentieth century, the occupation of the region was sparse (Turner 1990), the forest serving as a refuge during the colonial period for those Maya fleeing Spanish domination along the coasts and in the north, especially during the Caste War of the middle nineteenth century, when the northern Maya revolted against Mexico (Jones 1989).

History Matters: A Reply

2002 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 137-151
Author(s):  
Mark Pluciennik
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Preliminary Note ◽  
Hunter Gatherers ◽  
Primitive Society ◽  
Noble Savage ◽  
History Of ◽  
History Of Concepts ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Many ◽  
Anthropological History

First of all let me wholeheartedly thank all those who have responded for their helpful comments and careful readings. In this reply I would like first to discuss points dealing with the history of concepts related to ‘hunter-gatherers’, before pursuing the implications for contemporary prehistories. One preliminary note: van de Velde and Bogucki both point to the many advantages of Enlightenment thought (or reason). There are many political and scientific reasons to concur. I certainly have no desire to throw out the baby with the bathwater and return to metaphysical speculation as a substitute for archaeological and historical practice. I would also like to respond directly to van de Velde's comments about Adam Kuper (1988). Kuper's book, though also a work of critical anthropological history, is concerned with the later nineteenth century onwards and the idea of ‘primitive society’ characterised by certain forms of social and religious organisation, rather than subsistence (Kuper 1988, 5–7). I have argued elsewhere (Pluciennik 2001, 744–746) that this is typical of certain nineteenth-century European anthropologists and highlights a moment of divergence between ethnologists and archaeologists. Van de Velde also queries the omission of the ‘noble savage’ strand of Enlightenment thought from the paper. Certainly the recognition that there could be markedly different societies was sometimes used to critique the perceived excesses and artifices of the writer's society or of ‘civilisation’ more generally (Berkhofer 1978, 72–80; Carey 1998). However I would argue generally that the ‘noble savage’ has tended to be a minority construct adopted for strategic rhetorical and literary purposes (even if there was a revival from the 1960s with the ecologically noble savage: Buege 1996). Indeed Ellingson (2001) has recently proposed that even the trope of the noble savage was largely a 19th century invention, a myth constructed by racists to provide a stick with which to beat ‘liberals’. I disagree, in that the image of ‘Others’ supposedly without the corruption and vices of modern civilisation has long been utilised to construct alternatives to contemporary conditions and to progressive social evolutionary scenarios, with foragers supplying ‘evidence’ of an Edenic place, a Golden Age past, or degenerative human histories.

scholarly journals Towards the New Paradigm of Existence, Human to Posthuman: Reflections on Subash Chandran’s A Preface to Man.

2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 9
Author(s):  
Dhanesh M
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Spiritual Values ◽  
New Paradigm ◽  
Thomas More ◽  
Cartesian Dualism ◽  
Human Reason ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Vitruvian Man ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Western Humanism

The term “Posthumanism” is a contemporary theoretical term put forward by researchers with disciplinary backgrounds in philosophy, science and technology and literary studies, for these groups, Posthumanism designates a series of breaks with foundational assumptions of modern Western culture. It claims to offer a new epistemology that is not anthropocentric and therefore not centred in Cartesian dualism. It seeks to undermine the traditional boundaries between the human, the animal, and the technological. The postmodern theorist Ihab Hassan coined the term and offered a seminal definition in an article entitled "Prometheus as Performer: Towards a Posthumanist Culture?". As its name suggests, a defining characteristic of Posthumanism is its rejection of the values held on top by the traditional Western Humanism. In the words of Rosi Braidotti, “From Protagoras’ assertion that it is “the measure of all things”, to Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man, the privileging of the human instils a set of “mental, discursive and spiritual values” (13). This notion comes to form the basis for political policies of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe. Man is understood as an “intrinsically moral” being, functioning as a kind of vessel for perfect rationality and reason. Armed with these tools, man is capable of a limitless expansion toward his own perfection, and entitled to claim, as his own, whatever objects or others he encounters along the way. This privileging of man as the centre of everything is what Posthumanism aims to attack. Hassan says that posthuman does not mean the literal end of man but the end of an image of man shaped by Descartes, Thomas More and Erasmus. Braidotti in her book The Posthuman outlines that with the rise of ideologies like Fascism and Communism, Humanism started its ascending in the 1960s and 70s. Both these former ideologies represent a significant break from European Humanism: Fascism promoted a “ruthless” departure from the Enlightenment reverence for human reason, while Communism advocated a “communitarian notion of humanist solidarity” (17).

Women in science: Breaking out of the circle

1992 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
pp. 177-182 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social History ◽  
Charles Darwin ◽  
Women In Science ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Secondary Sexual Characteristics ◽  
Sexual Characteristics ◽  
History Of ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Mind

Marilyn Bailey Ogilvie, Women in science, antiquity through the nineteenth century . Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1986. Pp. xi 4- 254, £24.75. ISBN 0-262-15031-X Margaret Alic, Hypatia's heritage: a history of women in science from antiquity to the late nineteenth century . London: The Women’s Press, 1986. Pp. ix + 230, £4.95. ISBN 0-7043-3954-4 Londa Schiebinger, The mind has no sex? Women in the origins of modem science . Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1989. Pp. xi + 355, £23.50. ISBN 0-674-57623-3 Patricia Phillips, The scientific lady: a social history of woman's scientific interests 1520-1918 . London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1990. Pp. xiii + 279, £25.00. ISBN 0-297-82043-5 Uneasy careers and intimate lives: women in science, 1789-1979 . Edited by Pnina G. Abir-Am & Dorinda Outram. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1987. Pp. xiii + 365, £11.00. ISBN 0-8135-1255-7 Women of science: righting the record . Edited by G. Kass-Simon & Patricia Fames. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1990. Pp. xvi + 398, $39.95. ISBN 0-253-33264-8 Not long ago women were largely absent from the histories of science, even from social histories of science. With the 1960s came the questions: where were the women? how to do them justice? were there so few? why so few? Several books have now addressed these difficult questions. Charles Darwin gave an answer to the last question, by including ‘the intellectual powers of the sexes’ with the secondary sexual characteristics discussed in The descent of man, and selection in relation to sex .

History Museums and Identity

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Benjamin Filene
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
National Identity ◽  
Social History ◽  
American Identity ◽  
History Museums ◽  
History Of ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Community Identities

In the nineteenth century, elites saw museums as a tool to shape a citizenry, to mold a national identity. Even as the New Social History of the 1960s pushed for a more inclusive history, the idea of a shared American identity remained largely intact. In the 1990s, however, museums started to think of identity as more multifaceted and fragmented. History became a collection of stories whose morals and even main characters varied according to one’s perspective. Exhibitions encouraged visitors to explore their individual identities, and ethnically specific museums emerged to reinforce particular community identities. Recent years have seen another shift: some museums see their job less as to reinforce visitors’ identities than to show how identity works—how it is continually negotiated by individuals, communities, and cultures.

scholarly journals Pictures on a Page: Towards a History of the Photobook in New Zealand

2018 ◽  
pp. 5-21
Author(s):  
Athol McCredie
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New Zealand ◽  
Book Production ◽  
Scientific Publications ◽  
History Of ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
The 1960S

The term ‘photobook’ is very recent, yet numerous studies now survey histories of its development right back to the invention of photography. This article examines photographic books in New Zealand up to 1970 and concurrently explores definitions of the ‘photobook’ and whether, or to what extent, they can be applied to any of these publications. It considers nineteenth century albums, early scientific publications, and in particular, the books of scenery that have become such a stock item of New Zealand photographic book production. It also looks at a handful of books in the 1950s and 1960s that reacted against the scenic, as well as books of the 1960s inspired by photojournalism.

Massimo Quaini e il viaggio: il ruolo della verticalità

2021 ◽  
pp. 311-310
Author(s):  
Claudio Greppi
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New World ◽  
Local Culture ◽  
New Paradigm ◽  
Geographical Knowledge ◽  
The Andes ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Alps ◽  
Eighteenth And Nineteenth Centuries ◽  
The One

In the issue of Geotema dedicated to travel (“Travel as source of geographical knowledge”), in 1997, Massimo Quaini’s article topic was “The geographical invention of verticality: for the history of the ‘discovery’ of mountains”. It concerns a fundamental segment of the history of geographical knowledge, between eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, involving both the Old and New World: Saussure in the Alps and Humboldt in the Andes. He had already worked on this same topic in other occasions, investigating institutions like CAI in Italy, and mountain’s role in the ‘official’ geography. Such lectures mark a path that, I think, finds a theoretical output in 2006 Parma conference, dedicated to the “end of the travel”, where Quaini spoke about “Between Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century: the travel and the new paradigm of geography”: a rich and problematic lecture, opening to further researches. But perhaps before this point of arrival, the new paradigm, I would suggest to think on an idea offered by the Geotema article, where we read: “so, if we want to fully speak of discovering the mountains it will be necessary that the culture of the outside travellers meet that of the mountaineers”. Actually, in Quaini's last lecture I take into consideration, the one at Forte di Bard in September 2006, his attention shifts definitely on the figures of alpine travellers, who may encounter knowledge acquired from local culture.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document