The virtues of preaching and grammar
Hello Rabbi,
In lesson #3 in the new series on the virtues of sermons, the rabbi drew a comparison between the manner in which the virtues of sermons are delivered and the formation of artificial grammar as a byproduct of learning a natural language (acquired through what is called generative, universal grammar, etc.). Superficially, it is common to say in generative linguistics that “the native speaker is not mistaken” – this is because the category of true/false is not really relevant to natural language – there is understood/unintelligible. Only in artificial grammar, which is a tool for analysis, are there rules and exceptions to them.
I wanted to ask whether, in the Rabbi’s opinion, this way of thinking can be applied to the virtues of the sermon, and to say that there is actually a range of possibilities for correct interpretation by the sermon, and not necessarily one meaning, or one halacha, that can be correct. Just as in language, the same word or sentence can be used to express different ideas – “I am walking” can be interpreted as “I am moving my feet right now”, “I am leaving in a few minutes”, “I intend to arrive tomorrow for the event we talked about”, “I am a person who is characterized by walking a lot” – it all depends on the context and intention (and this is without going into the complex variations of using metaphors, expressions, slang, etc.). It is possible that in the drawing that the rabbi brought, in which Moses sits with God and learns the meanings of the various expressions in the Torah in the language of the sermon, there is not just one meaning for each expression – it is possible that the same expression can be interpreted in several ways (perhaps even contradictory!) and be understood in the “language of the sermon” – so that there could be a dispute from which several different laws (perhaps even contradictory?) emerge that legitimately (understandably) stem from the same expression in the Torah, and there is actually no contradiction between them, but simply a different understanding of different sages and perhaps legitimacy to act in accordance with any such understanding if it is not unfounded (cannot be understood in the language of the sermon).
In essence, according to this, the transmission of the Midot of the Hardash to Moshe is not necessarily the transmission of a one-to-one translation of each expression in the plain language into an expression in the Hardash and from that the creation of the grammar over time that allows the use of the Midot, but rather as in natural language – the examples can be many and different for the same expression itself, but still not be wrong. (In fact, it is more about the transmission of the language itself, the legality – and not about the precise transmission of the specific content that God wants each expression to express.)
I would love your response!
Thank you very much.
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Thanks for the answer.
A. What do you think is the meaning of incorrect use of a native speaker's language? Can you give an example?
B. Do you accept that, beyond the fact that there is no one-to-one correspondence, there can be a correspondence of one sentence to several different meanings in the text?
A. The examples are the same for a non-native speaker. If a person says I went for a walk, it is an error, even before the rule that the past tense ends in ”ti” (I went) was conceptualized. This was true before, but such a formal rule had not yet been formulated.
B. Yes.
Why is this an error? In what sense was it true even before the conceptualization? Do you mean error in the sense of a deviation from some convention or in a more fundamental sense?
I will explain in more detail. My argument is that the rules of grammar are just a conceptualization of what already existed before. When a language is born, it is spoken according to certain rules, but the speakers are not aware of them. They use them without being aware of them. At some point, grammarians come along and formulate the rules explicitly. They do not create them, but conceptualize and formulate them.
Now there are two possibilities: Even after conceptualization, there is no such thing as an “error”, because the use of language is free. There is no law that requires correct use (in other words: it is not an “offense” to make a mistake). If this is so, then both after conceptualization and before it, there is no such thing as an error in speech. This also does not fit your argument (that after conceptualization there are errors and before them there are none).
But this is not a reasonable assumption in my opinion. Although it is not an offense, it is an exception. A deviation from the rules is a linguistic error, and indeed it is not an offense and is not punished for it. And yet it is an error, incorrect speech. On this assumption, which you also agree with, since you agree that after conceptualization there are errors, then there were also the same errors before conceptualization. After all, the same rules prevailed then, but they were not formulated. So what is the difference in the question of whether or not there are errors in speech?
You probably assume that the process of conceptualization has a normative meaning. That is, that before we did indeed use the same rules (unconsciously and unformulated), but then deviating from them was “permitted” (i.e., there was no error). But after conceptualization, an obligation arose to speak according to the rules, and now there are errors in speech. But in my opinion, this is an unreasonable perception. Conceptualization is not an act of enactment but of reformulation. It does not have a normative status but rather a descriptive one. Therefore, the normative situation did not change following conceptualization. What changed was only our awareness of the rules.
This debate can be seen as a matter of definition (semantics), and has no place here.
Thank you very much.
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