Biblical Hebrew Forum

[TL Phillips <tiphillips AT InfoAve.Net>]

Bryan Rocine wrote:

Dear Fiends,

I wonder why my earlier question did not illicit any responses on-list.

[SNIP, noted]

the so-called "vav(or waw)-conversive," no matter what exactly it
is called,--Oh, boy, I shouldn't say this...so many scholars, so much
weighty tradition!!!-- does not exist.  The prefixed "narrative morpheme"
<vav-patakh-dagesh forte> on a yiqtol has discourse function rather than
conversive power.  It makes *explicit*(like the English words _then_ and
_so_) the consecutivity of events that is left implicit without it.

There really is no great shortage of "un-vavved" yiqtols which represent
single, past events, for instance, over 20 of them following the particle
_)az.

Bryan

I had written:
>B-Haverim,

[SNIP previous post]

Dear Bryan,

I am admittedly unsophisticated as a Hebraist (and the only reason I call myself one is because surely to goodness I deserve to imagine it after spending tons of money and years banging around with B-Hebrew :-).

So then tolerate me when I ask, are you saying the waw-convcrsive is not necessarily conversive at all, but instead a method of emphasis of linking passages to build a continuity within a larger discourse (?).

Thus, have I tried to pick up on this discourse business, and it seems quite natural. I have done some translating in the past, and actually understood the above (whether that's what you are proposing or not) in ignorance, I suppose. I just thought of the author(s) as storytellers, relating events and traditions dramatically or even in conversational modes.

Am I understanding or totally misunderstanding?

Tim Phillips
tiphillips AT infoave.net