98 GERALD A. KLINGBEIL – CHANTAL J. KLINGBEIL say, he was socially and pragmatically incompetent. Another option would be that this was an accepted linguistic form or expression and the problem of interpretation would thus be bound to linguistic conventions unknown to the modern reader, or, finally, Nehemiah could be deliberately using this expression to enhance his communicative attempt. Let us begin with the first option, namely, that this was a scribal error. While it is not uncommon for native speakers to get “tongue-tied”, it is rare for this to occur in a written official document, especially by one whose author claims to be a highly educated person. When a jarringly strange expression occurs within oral conversation, the speaker or the hearer normally draws attention to this and it is quickly corrected or clarified by the speaker. In this written form it is remarkable that such a supposed error would go unedited for so many millennia, when there are other examples of scribal corrections on less glaring errors or incongruences 26. For example the phrase “YHWH remained standing before Abraham” in Gen 18,22 was quickly altered/corrected in transmission on theological grounds, after all, how could God remain standing before a man, attending or being of service to a human being? 27 What about the second option, namely, that the author was unaware that his choice of words would be a potential interpretative problem to the hearer or reader? Studies in child discourse have shown that the “social rules of language use are acquired together with the formal properties of language already in early childhood” 28. These studies suggest that “certain aspects of the communicative properties of languages may be culture- and language-specific ” 29. In other words, the interpretative problem could lie with the modern reader. We, as the readers separated by time and language from the original text and its co-text, could be experiencing sociopragmatic failure. Sociopragmatic failure “stems from cross-culturally different perceptions of what constitutes appropriate linguistic behaviour” 30. It could be possible that within the linguistic conventions of Hebrew spoken at the Neither BHS nor BHQ note any problem in the particular phrase under 26 discussion. There is, however, a variant involving the spelling of the anomalous form of t/jWtp which does not have a bearing on the current issue. O uˆ Compare the careful discussion of the text in M. PRÖBSTLE, “YHWH 27 Standing Before Abraham: Genesis 18:22 and Its Theological Force”, Inicios, fundamentos y paradigmas. Estudios teológicos y exegéticos en el Pentateuco (ed. G.A. KLINGBEIL) (Libertador San Martín 2004) 169-189. S. BLUM-KULKA, “Learning to Say What you Mean in a Second 28 Language : A Study of the Speech Act Performance of Learners of Hebrew as a Second Language”, Applied Linguistics 3 (1982) 29. Ibid., 29. 29 J. THOMAS, “Cross-cultural Pragmatic Failure”, Applied Linguistics 4 30 (1983) 99.