[b-hebrew] How does biblical Hebrew describe a present event?
David Kummerow
farmerjoeblo at hotmail.com
Wed Jun 17 20:18:12 EDT 2009
Hi George,
The situation with a verbal system is often not a simple as you suggest.
It is not simply the presence vs absence of tense-marking morphemes
which creates tensed vs non-tensed distinctions, but also the wider
constructional and paradigmatic inventory. That is, some languages such
as English require a morpheme in the present tense indicating such.
Others use tensed morphemes only outside the present tense, with the
present tense using no morpheme as such. Others grammaticalize a
nonverbal copula morpheme in the present from third-person pronouns and
demonstratives. (See further Leon Stassen, _Intransitive Predication_.)
What this means is that your hypothesis that the verbless clause in BH
is a non-tensed construction due to the absence of a tense-indicating
morpheme is premature. The hypothesis needs to be additionally situated
in the wider paradigmatic structure of the language.
Regards,
David Kummerow.
> I agree with you in large part, Naama. Tense is indicated mostly by the
> deictic markers in the clause - that is, those elements that are not
> part of the verb, but which indicate something about the circumstance
> and context of the verb.
>
> I think that tense is, ultimately, an unhelpful category that we
> European-language speakers have unhelpfully imposed onto Semitic
> languages. Yes, we need to think about tense in the process of
> translation, since our European-based languages employ tense as a basic
> communicative category. However, I don't think biblical Hebrew has
> tense, and therefore when trying to understand biblical Hebrew on its
> own terms, it gets in the way.
>
> Both the simple noun clause and the participial clause are verbless
> clauses - there is nothing there to indicate tense. Hebrew is simply
> making basic equative statements in these cases: X = /X/. I would argue
> that since biblical Hebrew works on essentially presenting mainline
> actions to be viewed 'live', that present tense is usually inferred from
> verbless clauses because the reader is 'in the moment' of the text.
>
> BTW - great to 'see' you here!
>
>
> Regards,
>
> GEORGE ATHAS
> Moore Theological College (Sydney, Australia)
> www.moore.edu.au
>
>
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