Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Rolf Furuli <furuli AT online.no>]

-Henry Churchyard  wrote:

>
>> I agree that the Masoretes were extremely careful with their
>> pointing. The reasons why I believe that the difference between
>> wayyiqtol and yiqtol originated with them are: 1) There is no
>> evidence for this difference before the Masoretes. (Origen, for
>> instances did not know about it.)  2) There is no difference between
>> wayyiqtol and yiqtol in unpointed texts, and all the differences
>> seen in the MT can be reduced to one difference - apocopation
>> (togetherwith enclitic waw).  If there is absolutely no evidence for
>> a difference between wayyiqtol and yiqtol before the Masoretes, how
>> do we know there was such a difference?
>
>Mybe I'm misunderstanding you, but some points: 1) How do you suppose
>that the Masoretes went about "inventing" such a contrast?  Despite
>what Kahle thought, they don't really seem to have been
>"theoreticians", in the sense of remolding the recitation tradition
>and written text to make them artificially conform to innovative
>abstract ideas about what Hebrew "should be".


Dear Henry,

I am not suggesting any conspiracy on the part of the Masoretes. They were
not grammarians and therefore did not have grammatical views regarding the
text; and they would never dream of emending the text. They pointed the
text exactly as they heard it recited in the synagogue. Stress may be
phonemic in Hebrew but it need not be so in all instances. Look at Psalm
21:2. Here we have the compound ma(h)-yyfgel. The stress is retracted
because of mah, but the gemination and stress-shift do not make the meaning
different from  Psalm 35:9 tfgil with normal stress and no gemination. Even
qatals may have penultimate stress when wf is prefixed, e.g. 2 Kings 7:4
wfmftnu.

So to the Masoretes. If we look at Origen's Hexapla we find a very nice
correspondence between the values of the Tiberian vowels except for patah
and shewa. Patah is rendered by an a-sound in 57 % of the cases, with an
e-sound in 33 % of the cases and with zero in 8 % of the cases. Shewa
mobile is rendered by an a-sound in 12 % of the cases, by an e-sound in 16
% of the cases and by zero in 68 % of the cases. There is also evidence
that shewa and patah may have been pronounced similarly in Masoretic times.
If an important grammatical distinction should be marked, the worst
possible choice would be to use patah versus shewa.

I refer to J. Barr: "Vocalization and the Analysis of Hebrew among the
Ancient Translators"  Hebraische Wortforschung. Festschrift zum 80
Geburtstag von Walter Baumgartner. VT supp XVI, 1967, 1-11. In this article
he discusses how a person's mother tongue influences her when hearing
another language which she is going to transcribe. The Masoretes already
had a "tense-language", Mishnaic Hebrew or Aramaic, with past, present and
future. And in all sincerity, on the basis of what they heard in the
synagogue and on their own temporal understanding of language, they used
patah and shewa the way we know them from MT, with the result that the
language seemingly have four conjugations. Whether they intentionally used
patah for most cases of yiqtol+waw with past meaning or whether patah was
their only choice because of the stress they heard and their phonetic
rules, I cannot say. My point is, however, that the Masoretes were
extremely faithful to what they heard, but the elusive nature of patah and
shewa and their own presupposition pool led them to invent something which
they did not understand was an invention.
>
>2) You ignore the stress-shift in non-lamedh-he forms; the shifted
>position of stress actually corresponds exactly to the expected stress
>position in 2nd. millennium B.C.E consonant-final preterite *yaqtul
>(as opposed to vowel-final imperfect *yaqulu); I hope to have on-line
>soon a chapter from my dissertation about how the Tiberian consecutive
>imperfect stress shift has its origin in the existence of these
>separate forms before the early change of word-final short vowel loss,
>but a lot of the facts have already been assembled e.g. in Joshu
>Blau's 1976 outline grammar.

You are correct that I ignored stress-shift in non lamed-he forms. I should
have said that to add the prefix waw would increase the number of
syllabels, thus affecting the  position of the stress and resulting in
apocopation in many instances.

I am very interested in knowing more about your work and read your
dissertation. Could you please give some more data?
>
>3) Lamedh-he truncation is of wider applicability than wayyiqtol
>(perhaps originally because lamedh-he truncation allowed the jussive
>to be marked in all cases, while in non-lamedh-he roots, the jussive
>is marked only in a relatively small number of cases by the time of
>Tiberian), so I'm not sure how you can say the two are strictly
>equivalent.

I do not say that short imperfect and jussive are strictly equivalent. An
important explanation for the preterite nature of wayyiqtol is that the
short form is preferred, and that this short form goes back to a short
preterite in Ugaritic, Phoenician and Accadian. Thus the Hebrew prefix form
are two conjugations and not one. My point is that these short forms in all
the mentioned languages and also in Hebrew are connected with modality
(jussive). Short forms (e.g. Accadian iprus) is also used with past
meaning, but I have not seen evidence that they represent past tense
(preterite).  A diachronic study of any language reveals change. A form
which originally was modal need not remain so. But in the case of the
Semitic short prefix forms, what we *know* is  that they are used with
modal meaning (e.g. Accadian precative/cohortative, Ethiopic subjunctive,
Hebrew jussive etc.- and what about wayyiqtol+ cohortative?). To claim that
one short prefix form was modal and another preterite, or that modality
evolved into past tense or vice versa need to be established by  data and
not only presumed.

Stress is a part of speaking, and stress patterns similar to those found in
MT may very well have been the case in the 2nd. millennium B.C.E. But I
ask: How can we know if stress was phonemic (semantic) or just phonetic
(pragmatic)? I really look forward to reading your dissertation.

Regards
Rolf

Rolf Furuli
Lecturer in Semitic languages
University of Oslo