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Employing Language Typology for Teaching Biblical Hebrew: A Test Case in Cantonese-Chinese

Summary

Chau builds on Naudé and Miller-Naudé (OTE 2011), who argued that Biblical Hebrew (BH) textbooks confuse non-native English speakers because they explain Hebrew through English and other Indo-European grammar. Their proposed remedy is language typology: classifying languages by their formal features so a teacher can show where a learner's own language matches BH and where it differs. Chau tests this idea on a single language, Cantonese-Chinese, which is unrelated to BH, English and African languages. The motivating case was Kenyan students who had trouble with the BH definite article. Their language, like Cantonese, has no article and marks definiteness with a demonstrative. Chau compares BH, Cantonese and English across several areas: how subjects and objects are encoded, question formation, verbal semantics and clause syntax. He argues that the approach works across the whole grammar for learners of any native language. He also stresses that teachers do not need to be multilingual, since glossed research and the free WALS database supply the typological facts they need.

Key points

  • Published in Old Testament Essays 30(1), 2017, pp. 56–76. It is a follow-up to Naudé and Miller-Naudé's typology-based teaching grammar for African Bible translators.
  • Definiteness:
    • Cantonese and Kiitharaka (a Bantu language) have no definite-article morpheme and use a demonstrative instead. In Cantonese this demonstrative usually comes with a noun classifier (CL).
    • The same gap explains why some Cantonese-speaking relatives leave out English "the".
  • Subjects and objects: typology recognises five strategies for marking them:
    • word order (English and Cantonese, both SVO);
    • verbal agreement (BH: person, gender and number, plus the accusative marker ʾet);
    • case, also called dependent marking (Koine Greek);
    • head marking (Tzutujil, Mayan);
    • combinations of these.
  • Predicted difficulty: BH, Greek and Tzutujil all cross-reference person and number between verb and subject. Speakers of word-order languages such as Cantonese and English should therefore find BH agreement harder.
  • Tense vs aspect: Bantu languages and BH are aspect-prominent, while English is tense-prominent. Teaching BH verbs as tenses can hide an affinity that Bantu speakers already have.

Interesting ideas

  • I1. Explain a target structure by mapping it onto the learner's own system, not onto a third language. Routing through an intermediate language can hide similarities the learner already has. — For Mova (back): When translating through the meta-world, generate directly from meaning features (definiteness, aspect) instead of pivoting through English surface forms, so that distinctions English lacks are not lost.
  • I2. Treat "how is subject vs object signalled?" as a closed typology of five strategies (order, agreement, case, head marking, mix). Each language or register can then be described by which strategies it uses. — For Mova (tree): Make the parser's evidence for nsubj/obj explicit by strategy (position, agreement, case pronoun). Each attachment then gets an explainable reason, and marked fronted-object sentences can be flagged rather than misparsed.
  • I3. Errors made in a second language can be predicted from gaps in the speaker's first language, such as article omission when the first language uses demonstratives. — For Mova (tokens): Build a small, typologically motivated set of learner-English variants (missing articles, demonstrative-as-definite) to test that the tagger and later stages degrade gracefully on non-native input.
  • I4. Definiteness can be carried by different devices: an article in one language, a demonstrative plus classifier in another. The meaning stays constant while the form varies. — For Mova (world): Store definiteness and identifiability as an entity-level feature that can come from "the", "this" or context. Reference resolution should not depend on the article alone.
  • I5. Instead of requiring expertise in every language, rely on glossed examples plus a shared feature database like WALS to anticipate where learners will struggle. — For Mova (answer): A typology-style checklist could tag school-test items by the grammatical features they hinge on (articles, aspect, questions). Failures could then be traced to a specific feature rather than read as overall accuracy.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

Fields: Linguistics & languages

Cite

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

@inproceedings{chau2017employing,
  title = {{Employing Language Typology for Teaching Biblical Hebrew: A Test Case in Cantonese-Chinese}},
  author = {Chau, Kevin},
  booktitle = {Old Testament Essays 30},
  year = {2017},
  doi = {10.17159/2312-3621/2017/v30n1a5},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.17159/2312-3621/2017/v30n1a5}
}

References

2 references, 0 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

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  2. Greenstein, Edward L. “The Syntax of Saying ‘Yes’ in Biblical Hebrew.” JANESCU 19 (1989): 51-59. Holmstedt, Robert D. The Relative Clause in Biblical Hebrew. LSAWS 10. Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 2016. Joosten, Jan. The Verbal System of Biblical Hebrew: A New Synthesis Elaborated on the Basis of Classical Prose. JBS 10. Jerusalem: Simor, Ltd., 2012. Joüon, Paul and Takamitsu Muraoka. A Grammar of Biblical Hebrew. 2nd ed. Rome: Gregorian and Biblical Press, 2011. Matthews, Stephen and Virginia Yip. Cantonese: A Comprehensive Grammar. London: Routledge, 2010. Miller, Cynthia L. “Linguistics.” Pages 657-69 in Dictionary of Old Testament: Historical Books. Edited by Bill T. Arnold and Hugh G. M. Williamson. Downers Grove, IL: Intervarsity Press. Naudé, Jacobus A. and Cynthia L. Miller-Naudé. “A New Biblical Teaching Grammar for African Bible Translators: A Typological Approach.” OTE 24/3 (2011): 690-707. Pope, Emily. “Questions and Answers in English.” PhD Thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1972. Sadock, Jerrold M. and Arnold M. Zwicky. “Speech Act Distinction in Syntax.” Pages 155-196 in Clause Structure. Edited by Timothy Shopen. Vol. 1 of Language Typology and Syntactic Description. 1st ed. Edited by Timothy Shopen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985. Song, Jae Jung. Linguistic Typology: Morphology and Syntax. London: Routledge, 2001. Song, Jae Jung. The Oxford Handbook of Linguistic Typology. Oxford: Oxford Press, 2013. Song, Zuoyan and Hongyin Tao. “A Unified Account of Causal Clause Sequences in Mandarin Chinese and Its Implications.” StLang 33 (2009): 69-102. Thompson, Sandra A., Robert E. Longacre, and Shin Ja J. Hwang. “Adverbial Clauses.” Pages 237-300 in Complex Constructions. Edited by Timothy Shopen. Vol. 2 of Language Typology and Syntactic Description. Edited by Timothy Shopen. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Van der Merwe, Christo H. J., Jackie Naudé and Jan H. Kroeze. A Biblical Hebrew Reference Grammar. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2006. Whaley, Lindsay. Introduction to Typology: The Unity and Diversity of Language. Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, 1997. Waltke, Bruce K. and Michael P. O’Connor. An Introduction to Biblical Hebrew Syntax. Winona Lake, Ind.: Eisenbrauns, 1990. find

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