Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Paul Zellmer <zellmer AT cag.pworld.net.ph>]

Rolf Furuli wrote:

> If wayyiqtol is treated as a present why could it not be completely time
> indifferent? Do you have good arguments for WAYYIQTOL being different from
> YIQTOL? How in the world can a simple conjunction have such a tremendous
> transforming power? Has anybode explained this satisfactorily?
>

Rolf,

The wayyiqtol cannot be completely time indifferent because it is use to move 
time
along in narratives.  I'm certain that any student of linguistics like you 
would agree
that time does indeed move through the narratives, and the vast majority of 
this
movement is not marked adverbially.  The only force that is consistently 
present is
the verb, and the wayyiqtol moves the story along most expeditiously.  How 
could you
then divorce it from time?

Because of your impassioned and lengthy arguments over the non-difference of 
the
wayyiqtol and yiqtol, I dare not step into a debate on the differences of the 
two.  I
sincerely doubt that anything I say would shake your position in the least, 
and right
now the rest of the listmembers are probably so saturated with that debate 
that many
of them would probably not even read the posts, much less decide on the basis 
of
further debate.  I will simply state my position: the convention in BH 
grammar *does*
use the wayyiqtol and not the simple yiqtol as the main form in historical 
narrative
passages.  If the deictic center is taken as the time of narration, then the 
vast
majority of these wayyiqtols occur in past time.  If you are willing to allow 
for some
cases of "past tense" that include the deictic center in those languages 
which express
tense in the verbs, using as your basis that the vast majority of "past 
tense" cases
do not have this problem, then why argue that the wayyiqtol cannot carry with 
it the
element of +past simply because you find a small percentage of exceptions to 
that
rule?

As for my suggestion that the wayyiqtol is the moving of the deictic center 
to the
time of the narrative event, making the deictic center coincide with the 
referent
time, there is one big problem.  If this is the case, then we should express 
cases
where the narratives are clearly marked throughout as past time.  This is the 
normal
pattern for "histories" as opposed to "stories," and is very much an option 
in the
two-tense language that I work with in the Philippines.  (Of course, the 
Ibanag
language *is* a tense-language, and the Hebrew does not appear to be.)  But 
its
absence in the tanakh would seem to suggest that my suggestion is not valid.

> >
> >> 2Kings 17:34 To this day they do (participle) according to the former
> >>manner.
> >>
> >
> >Follow me closely on this on.  Explicitly, both English and Hebrew have C
> >as a moving
> >point that comes to, but does not include, the time of writing.
> >Implicitly, the time
> >of writing is included.  And RT moves to coincide with C.
>
> I have never heard of a moving C before. Is this a novel thought?
>

Not so much a novel thought as a new expression of an old thought.  I'm 
basically
trying to express in terms of deictic center the idea, "Wherever (or at 
whatever time
[until this day]) you examine, they do according to former manner."  This is 
clearly
what I see happening here in both the Hebrew and the English.  Perhaps you 
have a more
elegant way to say this that does not require a moving C.

hth,

Paul

--
Paul and Dee Zellmer, Jimmy Guingab, Geoffrey Beltran
Ibanag Translation Project
Cabagan, Philippines

zellmer AT faith.edu.ph