Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Lee R. Martin" <lmartin AT vol.com>]

Dear Dave,
Thanks for repeating your view.


>   I see the WP as a simple statement,
> e.g. "I stubbed my toe.  It hurt."  Obviously the hurt comes after the
> accident, but the verb forms don't tell us that.  Also, it's clear that
> stubbing one's toe is a perfective event, but again the verb form
> doesn't tell us that.  The meanings of the verbs involved tell us that,
> i.e. the semantics of the two clauses code this information, the
> syntax doesn't.  With the WP, things like aspect, sequentiality (if
> there is such a word), tense etc. are coded by the semantics and
> pragmatics of the clauses and words, not by the syntax of the verb
> form.  Does that make more sense?  Sorry for any confusion I may
> have caused earlier.

No, I am afraid that it doesn't make sense to me.  I cannot agree with your 
statements
above.

>
> > Dave, my questions for you (and anyone else) are:
> > 1) What is the origin and function of the Wa+Dagesh morpheme?
>
> I see this morpheme as what Ray Jackendoff calls a "specified
> grammatical formative" that happens to resemble the conjunction in
> its consonant.  This shouldn't surprise us: we have other examples
> of this phenomenon, such as the H-article and the H-interrogative,
> as well as the elided form of MN looking just like the participial
> formative in non-qal verb stems.  In essense, I don't see us dealing
> with an attached waw, but with  an attached waw+patah+dagesh.

I agree so far, but...


> In my view, its function is to signal the simple (usually past)
> declarative, having no syntactic relation to what precedes it
> (syntactic being the key word there).

I appreciate your innovation, but your term "simple declarative" just does 
not fit what I
see in the Hebrew text.  Qatal is often "simple declarative."  Yiqtol in the 
present and
future tenses is "simple declarative."

By the way, I enjoyed your article on David's mourning.  You may be correct 
in suggesting
punctuation changes there.

--

Lee R. Martin
Pastor, Prospect Church of God, Cleveland, Tennessee
Instructor in Hebrew and Old Testament
Church of God Theological Seminary
http://www.earth.vol.com/~lmartin/