The time has come the walrus said ...

Is it possible to define a globally applicable, height and prominence-free definition of a significant hill? As a child I could reel off the highest points in each continent and in numerous countries around the world. Soon after we were married, my wife and I made a point of climbing the highest summits at least in England, Wales and Scotland, although tentative plans to work through the Munros ground to a halt after three Cairngorm summits plus Schiehallion. All hills are worth climbing of course, because they're there, but are some hills more worth climbing than others? There are many lists of hills out there, of which the Munros are by far the most famous. But, stuck in East Anglia, with even the Peak District barely in range, and certainly nothing approaching 3000 feet, does that mean one should give up? Well, even in the South-East there are Marilyns. The definitions of a [significant] hill seem so arbitrary though, 3000 feet for Munros, 2500 feet for Corbetts, 150m promine

In an accompanying post I propose a model to explain how the verb conjugations function in Biblical Hebrew. Here I seek to put my money where my mouth is by applying the model to the translation of a psalm. I should stress that the model was developed and tested on prose, as only with prose are clause boundaries (usually) obvious, and furthermore poetry may override standard word orders for stylistic effect. Thus some of the analysis and translation below is tentative as it depends on assumptions as to clause boundaries and structure. I chose Psalm 44 as it exhibits a good mix of clause-initial and non-clause-initial qatal and yiqtol verb forms, as well as frequent wayyiqtol . The accompanying gloss is stilted as I wanted to highlight the verbal semantics for each verse. The comments explain the resultant pragmatics and semantics, but you will need to read the post describing the verb model, and preferable the full paper to really get to grips with it. The NIV translation uses a

A model based on the interaction of conjugation type and word order with the cognitive category of "definiteness"... Having taught myself Biblical Hebrew, I rapidly became aware that the system of verb conjugations was poorly understood. There are many theories as to the differences in meaning between the two conjugations, but many English versions of the Old Testament seem to regularly ignore the contrast between the conjugations in their translations of the psalms and other poetic material. As a (plant) scientist I was used to dealing with 'fuzzy' data. I have also done field linguistics, analysing an unwritten language by amassing a large corpus of spoken text. I used these experiences to approach Biblical Hebrew, reading the Old Testament text corpus repeatedly until consistent meanings for the conjugations began to crystallise out. The results of this data-driven approach are briefly summarised below, and you can also read the full paper . I hope that the mode