Tense and Grammarians...
Henry Churchyard
churchyh at ccwf.cc.utexas.edu
Sat Dec 12 14:32:01 EST 1998
> Subject: Re[2]: "Consecutive imperfect"...
> From: "R. Hoberman" <rdhoberman at ccmail.sunysb.edu>
> Date: Fri, 11 Dec 1998 09:46:43 -0400 (EDT)
> Rolf Furuli wrote:
>> "... the first Hebrew grammarians entered the scene. They made
>> their grammars on the basis of induction and when they interpreted
>> the verbal system of the MT, they did so on the basis of *tense*
>> because they did not know aspect..."
> Wait a minute! The earliest grammarians of Hebrew may not have had
> a theory of tense (I don't know) but their native language was
> Arabic, which is much more clearly aspectual then Hebrew. So they
> should have intuitively interpreted Hebrew in terms of aspect. If
> they did not, then we may be able to learn something about the ways
> in which BH works in terms of tense versus aspect by trying to
> understand their point of view.
But on the other hand, "Middle Hebrew" (or whatever you want to call
it) was rather tense-based (qatal Past, qotel Present, yiqtol future,
basically the same as modern Israeli...).
--
--Henry Churchyard churchyh at ccwf.cc.utexas.edu
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