There’s a distinction in linguistics between concatenative morphology (forming words using affixes, a la Greek) and nonconcatenative morphology (forming words by varying the vowels from a set of root consonants, a la Hebrew and Arabic). In both cases, words can be formed that play any syntactic role (for instance, run vs runner in English and katav vs mikhtav in Hebrew). Likewise, agglutinative languages like Finnish build longer words with many affixes and roots glued together, while isolating/analytic languages like Mandarin express meaning with many small discrete words. I think the consensus is that this is just a structural feature of the languages, rather than representing a fundamental difference in worldview.
But maybe I’m misunderstanding what you’re getting at here. Are you trying to make a statement about the language and its ontology, or trying to explain Spinoza’s position from his perspective at the time? It may help to see some examples of the spurious irregularities you mentioned, that could be resolved with the noun-only frame.
I don’t think nonconcatenative morphology ipso facto implies a different ontology.
Greek and Latin have whole different sets of morphological modifications for verbs vs. nouns, some words take the verb modification, others take the noun modifications; there are two different data structures for words. English doesn’t have that; you can say “I went on a run” and be understood with no double-takes. Some words carry “irregular” modifications proper to the source language, especially ones that come from Old English, but in a much more scattered way that doesn’t reflect a coherent categorization across the whole language.
On concrete examples of spurious irregularities, here are two from the Compendium:
The infinitive. Spinoza argues in Chapter 5 that the Hebrew infinitive “is a pure unadulterated noun” that “knows nothing about the present, nor past, nor any time whatever.” In Latin, the infinitive carries tense. Amare is present (“to love”), amavisse is perfect (“to have loved”). So grammarians working from Latin categories classified the Hebrew infinitive as a verb form, and then had to treat it as deficient because it lacks the tense marking a “verb” should have. But Spinoza says it doesn’t carry tense because it isn’t a verb. It’s a name for an action. (The Hebrew metalinguistic term for “infinitive” is shem hapo’al, literally “name of the action.”) The “irregularity” disappears when you stop expecting it to behave like a Latin infinitive.
The passive reflexive. In Chapter 21, Spinoza identifies a verb form he says “seems to be unknown to all the grammarians whom I know.” The specific example is Ezekiel 23:48, where the form וְנִוַּסְּרוּ (weniwwasseru, “that they may be taught”) appears. This is what modern grammarians now call the Nithpael, a passive reflexive combining features of the Niphal and Hithpael.
Here’s how one gets there. We start with a root י-ס-ר (yasar) indicating the idea of applying discipline. Render it reflexive and it’s hithyasser, meaning “applies self-discipline”. Then apply the passive and it means “made to be self-disciplining.”
From a Greco-Latin perspective you encounter this word and the first question you ask is, “which schema do I apply? Is it a verb? Is it a noun?” and it’s hard to answer. But it’s a whole compound predicate. It’s unusual to do that by just stacking two operators on a root even in Hebrew, but it’s not as weird as it would be if you had to first categorize a word as a verb or a noun, and then apply the appropriate modification within that data structure.
The standard framework of Spinoza’s era recognized seven binyanim (standard modifications of a root) and this form didn’t fit any of them, so grammarians either emended it as a scribal error or classified it as anomalous. Spinoza argues it’s a regular pattern the grammarians couldn’t see because their framework didn’t have a slot for it. Modern Hebrew grammar now reifies the Nithpael as a rare but real stem formation.
I think this belongs in the post so I’m going to edit it in.
Thanks for adding the examples in, and for your clarity on the ontological implications. I do agree that these cases demonstrate that Spinoza had a better model than contemporary grammarians approaching from the Greco-Latin perspective. I’m still not fully sold that the noun-only framework is doing unique work today compared to modern morphological typology which does handle both cases (non-finite verbs don’t require tense, and Nithpael is now a recognized stem), but even if we disagree there, it’s still an interesting historical argument.
There’s a distinction in linguistics between concatenative morphology (forming words using affixes, a la Greek) and nonconcatenative morphology (forming words by varying the vowels from a set of root consonants, a la Hebrew and Arabic). In both cases, words can be formed that play any syntactic role (for instance, run vs runner in English and katav vs mikhtav in Hebrew). Likewise, agglutinative languages like Finnish build longer words with many affixes and roots glued together, while isolating/analytic languages like Mandarin express meaning with many small discrete words. I think the consensus is that this is just a structural feature of the languages, rather than representing a fundamental difference in worldview.
But maybe I’m misunderstanding what you’re getting at here. Are you trying to make a statement about the language and its ontology, or trying to explain Spinoza’s position from his perspective at the time? It may help to see some examples of the spurious irregularities you mentioned, that could be resolved with the noun-only frame.
I don’t think nonconcatenative morphology ipso facto implies a different ontology.
Greek and Latin have whole different sets of morphological modifications for verbs vs. nouns, some words take the verb modification, others take the noun modifications; there are two different data structures for words. English doesn’t have that; you can say “I went on a run” and be understood with no double-takes. Some words carry “irregular” modifications proper to the source language, especially ones that come from Old English, but in a much more scattered way that doesn’t reflect a coherent categorization across the whole language.
On concrete examples of spurious irregularities, here are two from the Compendium:
The infinitive. Spinoza argues in Chapter 5 that the Hebrew infinitive “is a pure unadulterated noun” that “knows nothing about the present, nor past, nor any time whatever.” In Latin, the infinitive carries tense. Amare is present (“to love”), amavisse is perfect (“to have loved”). So grammarians working from Latin categories classified the Hebrew infinitive as a verb form, and then had to treat it as deficient because it lacks the tense marking a “verb” should have. But Spinoza says it doesn’t carry tense because it isn’t a verb. It’s a name for an action. (The Hebrew metalinguistic term for “infinitive” is shem hapo’al, literally “name of the action.”) The “irregularity” disappears when you stop expecting it to behave like a Latin infinitive.
The passive reflexive. In Chapter 21, Spinoza identifies a verb form he says “seems to be unknown to all the grammarians whom I know.” The specific example is Ezekiel 23:48, where the form וְנִוַּסְּרוּ (weniwwasseru, “that they may be taught”) appears. This is what modern grammarians now call the Nithpael, a passive reflexive combining features of the Niphal and Hithpael.
Here’s how one gets there. We start with a root י-ס-ר (yasar) indicating the idea of applying discipline. Render it reflexive and it’s hithyasser, meaning “applies self-discipline”. Then apply the passive and it means “made to be self-disciplining.”
From a Greco-Latin perspective you encounter this word and the first question you ask is, “which schema do I apply? Is it a verb? Is it a noun?” and it’s hard to answer. But it’s a whole compound predicate. It’s unusual to do that by just stacking two operators on a root even in Hebrew, but it’s not as weird as it would be if you had to first categorize a word as a verb or a noun, and then apply the appropriate modification within that data structure.
The standard framework of Spinoza’s era recognized seven binyanim (standard modifications of a root) and this form didn’t fit any of them, so grammarians either emended it as a scribal error or classified it as anomalous. Spinoza argues it’s a regular pattern the grammarians couldn’t see because their framework didn’t have a slot for it. Modern Hebrew grammar now reifies the Nithpael as a rare but real stem formation.
I think this belongs in the post so I’m going to edit it in.
Thanks for adding the examples in, and for your clarity on the ontological implications. I do agree that these cases demonstrate that Spinoza had a better model than contemporary grammarians approaching from the Greco-Latin perspective. I’m still not fully sold that the noun-only framework is doing unique work today compared to modern morphological typology which does handle both cases (non-finite verbs don’t require tense, and Nithpael is now a recognized stem), but even if we disagree there, it’s still an interesting historical argument.
I’m not particularly making a claim vs present-day paradigms in linguistics.