Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Henry Churchyard <churchyh AT ccwf.cc.utexas.edu>]

> 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