My translation wasn't that far from the NET (ignoring the risky aspect I chose for the first word). "young boys" is better than "little children", however I'm pretty certain they were "young men", given the wider context they were likely sent by the powers that be in Bethel. The prophet didn't complete his journey.

@Dɑvïd I know that you are very busy but I wanted to ask if you know the books of Bill T. Arnold.

I refer particularly to his A Guide to Biblical Hebrew Syntax.

The second edition will be soon available.

@PaulVargas Less busy in the latter half of the week! ;)

@PaulVargas It's a great resource, and I highly recommend it. Of course, it's always important with syntax to recognize that there is a greater degree of "judgement"/discrimination to apply in contrast to morphology, which is what it is. Syntactic categories can be more fluid, less rigid, less secure. But all the same, as describing aspects of usage in Biblical Hebrew, Arnold & Choi is an excellent guide.

(I wonder what @curiousdannii would make of the morphology/syntax distinction I've described ^^^. I don't think it's idiosyncratic or controversial. But esp. with some treatments of, approaches to, and applications of NT Greek syntax, I don't think it is sufficiently recognized.)

@Dɑvïd Eh, I don't normally like to separate morphosyntax. I think syntax may seem more fluid because things like pragmatics and discourse analysis are less well understood and even less well taught

But lots of morphology is also very messy. For example for the Greek deponent, saying that it's "active in meaning but middle/passive in form" is surely quite misleading

@curiousdannii That reminded me of a blog post of Daniel Zacharias.

@curiousdannii Ah, but that's not morphology -- that's already an example of the problem I was warning against! ;)

@Dɑvïd It's understanding the meanings of the "middle" and "passive" suffix paradigms (using the names for the forms and not necessarily implying their meanings)... I think that makes it morphology.

@curiousdannii It confuses description of forms with lexicon/semantics. These are related, but they are not the same.

("The Greek 'deponent'", I mean, not middle/passive forms - there really are such things!)

@Dɑvïd If you're not bringing semantics into it, you're barely doing linguistics at all. That's more like philology

Philology isn't really the right word. It's too generous even for the person who studies forms without their meanings! ;)

In other news, I'd emailed an author earlier this week about a book which must be out of print as I can only find second hand copies for 700AUD (500USD), and he replied with the full book in word docs, so that's great!

@curiousdannii What's the book about?

@curiousdannii No, philology isn't the right word. ;) NOT confusing morphology and semantics isn't "not doing linguistics", it's handling language description responsibly!

@PaulVargas the noetic effects of sin

@Dɑvïd They're each their own domain, but you can't say you understand a language if you only have one and not the other

Are you really saying morphology should be nothing more than a description of possible forms?

IMO, morphosyntax must include discussion of the language's grammaticalised grammatical categories.

@curiousdannii Yes, they're each their own domain, and I never said (or, I believe!) implied that "you understand a language if you only have one and not the other".

@curiousdannii "Morphology" !== "morphosyntax" (which is your term, not mine!).

As I said, I don't think this is controversial, just a matter of basic clarity in description. But here's John Lyons from his Introduction to Theoretical Linguistics:

Anyway! I'll leave it there :) and get back to enegue's Hebrew matters later.

@Dɑvïd No, but I don't think there's a lot to be gained by separating morphology and syntax. That's not controversial either. (In analysis that is. Maybe it helps pedagogically.)

@Dɑvïd I'm sorry, but I don't understand your point then

Or is this your point (from linguistics.stackexchange.com/a/1014/2555)

> There are other differences as well. Bound morphemes are very fussy about their order, and normally don't tolerate any variance. Syntax, however, spins off variation at the drop of a syllable, resulting in many competing patterns which frequently die off, but just as frequently fission into separate constructions.