Biblical Hebrew Forum

[yochanan bitan <ButhFam AT compuserve.com>]

we must be careful to ask the right questions.
sorry, living languages might not be mutually-exclusive logic grids.

one cannot delete time or aspect or mood from the hebrew verb by showing
contexts where one does not fit. 

the right qustion is in a particular context to ask whether a verb is
marking the time, the aspect or the mood. e.g. it will be seen that most
prefix verbs mark future and not in-process aspect. a "binary verb system"
must be mapped to a communicative reality.

{rolf ruruli wrote}
>The conclusion is therefore that in clauses with hayyom meaning "now", we
>find the verb form qatal, yiqtol, wayyiqtol and the participle with
exactly
>the same meaning as far as time is concerned. How can any of them be
tenses?

how can they be tenses? --
in the same way that in english we can say, in exactly the same situation:

now we're dead
now we're going to die
now we will die
how can any of them be either tenses or aspects?

because paraphrase in a language does not mean absolute equivalency. 

please don't set-up "straw-men" -
because with a BINARY SYSTEM like hebrew we are not dealing with pure tense
or pure aspect but with tense-aspect-moods.

what is a tense-aspect-mood?
something that in certain situations SIGNALS TIME and that in other
situations SIGNALS ASPECT and in other situations SIGNALS mood.

why am i uneasy with "pragmatic implicatures"?
because the suffix tense-aspect-mood and the prefix tense-aspect-mood are
not marking pragmatics. nor do they uniquely mark any defined aspect. nor
do they uniquely mark mood. nor are they unknowable.
as for time reference, this is not only an implicature from a context,
since the Tense-Aspect-Mood is used to signal (be in concord with) the time
reference in many (most) contexts.

shov ashuv elexa ka`et Haya.. "i WILL return to you" gn 18.10
ashuv is not marking aspect (e.g., habitual or in-process) and leaving the
listener clueless as to time, but it is signalling non-past reference. this
is a default situation for the prefix tense-aspect-mood.

the right qustion in a particular context is to ask whether a verb is
marking the time, the aspect or the mood. it will be seen that most prefix
verbs mark future and not "in-process aspect". the aspect is usually
"complete" or irrelevant in future contexts, and duly marked with prefix
tense-aspect-moods.

likewise in past contexts, there are cases where the aspect is "incomplete"
yet suffix tense [or vav hahippux prefix equivalent] are used. E.g. ruth
1.6 vatashov misde moav. 
this event is past but was still "in-process" at that point of the
narrative. 
the returning wan't yet complete. 
gn 37.28 vayya`avru "and they passed by" refers to the past tense but was
still in-process "not whole" in the story. 
[in fact, there are many places in Genesis where the LXX choses an
imperfect in order to MARK ASPECT. Hebrew rarely took the trouble to
distinguish aspect. greek was very sensitive to ASPECT, and marked all its
subjunctives, imperatives and infinitives for aspect. Hebrew was very
ambivalent to aspect, and did not mark imperatives or infinitives for
aspect. for "subjunctive" it defaulted to prefix tense-aspect-mood. greek
DISTINGUISHED tense and aspect, hebrew BLENDED tense and aspect.]

it is a mistake to attempt to squeeze/delete mood, aspect or tense from of
the hebrew verb. 
to imply that the Hebrew verb semantics have NOTHING to do with time, or
NOTHING to do with aspect, or NOTHING to do with mood is an error. 

randall buth