In your most commendable editorial of Jan. 28 concerning Sen. Bennet (“
Linguists have long known that the best indication of an author attributing inner life to a character is in making them the subject of mental verbs, such as think, know, suspect, guess, see, hear, wish, etc.
In the first two pages of my monolingual Hebrew edition of Genesis (originally circa 1,000-600 BC), one finds 23 examples of two mental verbs: “see” (11) and “say” (12), all attributed to one subject (God). On pages 3-4, after the first humans had at long last been created and the subject pool quadrupled (God, Adam, Eve, the snake), one finds an expanded pool of mental verbs: “say” (11), “be bashful” (1), “know” (2), “see” (1), “fear” (1), and “order” (2 ).
In the first two pages of my bilingual Greek-English edition of Homer’s Iliad (originally circa 900 BC), one finds the following inventory of mental verbs: “sing” (2), “wrath” (1), “wish/want” (1), “be angry” (1), “allow/grant” (1), “shout assent” (1), “heart be pleased” (2), “command” (1), “speak” (1), “fear” (1), “listen” (1), “pray” (1), and “hear” (1), attributed to either human or Godly subjects.
Any literate reader could easily do similar counts with Ovid, Beowulf, the Icelandic Sagas, Dante, Chaucer or the Upanishads. So either Harold Bloom didn’t pay much attention when reading his classics or he is a literary critic with a peculiar grasp of human language.
Tom Givón
Ignacio
