Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Vincent DeCaen <decaen AT chass.utoronto.ca>]

I guess I'm still bitter about not having my own work in print: got
dicked around by both Sheffield and Peter Lang. on the other hand,
learned a lot about academic presses. ;-) may try to get it out in a
dissertation series. but as is becoming increasingly evident, now is
not a good time to be synthesizing/rewriting when so much is going on,
so many agendas are still under way. too much. maybe in 5-10 years, as
the dust settles and more secure findings are available and frameworks
are worked out in full we might try to find a growing consensus.

I think the greatest problem is so many people are working in
isolation: Europe and Israel and N America seem to worlds apart in
terms of coordinated work, ditto universities, seminaries, etc. the
right and left hands don't know what the other's doing. ditto linguistics
vs theology.  we need some serious interaction and collaboration, and
it's just not happening. <big sigh>

re two works suggested. looked them over quickly, read intros/concl.s
in full.
(1)Goldfajn is reduplicating Revell's 1989 article. nothing new here,
except of course that "time" is in the title.
(2)Hatav depresses me out of my gourd. but it apparently is a rewrite
of a 1977 thesis, so let's cut some slack. recent research seems to be
limited to reading Hebrew Studies journal. TMA work out of date. but
hey, it's another work that establishes the framework of modern
linguistics, which is always helpful for the nonspecialist.
for hatav, on the plus side, there is the important notion of sequence
(a mood! not an aspect), there is the rehabilitation of the
participle, there is the separation of mood from the rest. so, there's
lots of good stuff, and again, there is a methodology and a framework.
just for future reference, here's how I would redo table 1.3, p29

        wayyiqtol       weqatal yiqtol  qatal qotel
SEQU    +               +       0       0       0
MOOD    +               +       +/0     0       0
PROG    0               0       0       0       +
PAST    0               +       0       +       0

comments. it's naive to lump the yiqtols together under mood. oh well.
it's also inadequate to leave out syntactic and morphological
analysis, especially with relation to yiqtols. finally, qotel is not a
separate verb form, but a separate paradigm, with yehi qotel, hayah
qotel, wayhi qotel, etc, etc. so what can you do? I call this a
"shadow paradigm".

I'll give a full report when I've done looking in more detail. but you
need to look at these works, no doubt. should also keep up reading in
Zeitschrift fur Althebraistik, etc, at least more than Hebrew Studies.

Cheers
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Vincent DeCaen, Ph.D.  <decaen AT chass.utoronto.ca>

Hebrew Syntax Encoding Initiative
http://www.chass.utoronto.ca:8080/~decaen/hsei/intro.html
c/o Deparment of Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations
4 Bancroft Ave., 2d floor, University of Toronto, Toronto ON, M5S 1A1
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