Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Rolf Furuli <furuli AT online.no>]

Dear Lee and Dave:




>Lee,
>> Dear Dave,
>> Rolf Furuli says wayyiqtol is imperfective (tenseless);
>> Vince DeCaen says it is modal/sequential;
>> Randall Buth says it is perfective (past tense);
>> Bryan Rocine says it is imperfective/sequential;
>> Many traditional scholars say it is equivalent to qatal.
>> Niccacci focuses on discourse function rather than aspect and tense.
>
>If this summary doesn't demonstrate our total confusion about the
>Hebrew verbal system, nothing will!  Obviously, we all still have a
>lot of work to do.

When there is so much confusion, why don't you use modern linguistic
principles to create a model that can differentiate between what is
"semantic meaning" and what is "conversational pragmatic implicature" in
each verb form?  You can get such a model for less than $ 70, because Mari
Broman Olsen has outlined an excellent model which can be applied to Hebrew
verbs.


>I believe that Vince has said that the Wa prefix signals sequence, and the
>shortened
>form proves modality.  Rolf has said that the Wa was invented by the
>Masoretes. I'm
>not sure what other people think.

Just to avoid misunderstanding: I do not think that the Masoretes
manipulated the text in any way: they were extremely careful copyists. But
their pointing of the forms that we call "wayyiqtol" which evidently was
done on a non-grammatical foundation, were by the first Hebrew grammarian
from the 9th/10th century onward interpreted in a way that made wayyiqtol
into a distinctive conjugation. If this is correct, the Masoretes, by
following their phonetic laws, unintentionally laid the foundation for a
four-component verbal model, but they did not invent it.



>I'm going to go out on a limb here and state something that I
>haven't said publicly before, but have held for years: I don't think
>there truly is such a thing as the weqatal.  It has no distinct form,
>very unlike the WP (except for the Masoretic accentuation, which
>may or may not be accurate) and can be explained just as easily
>as a simple qatal that happens to occur at the beginning of a
>clause with a conjunction.  We are told in our baby Hebrew
>classes that there are examples of W+qatal that are not weqatals,
>yet we're supposed to accept that somehow somebody knows the
>difference.  I don't buy it.  As you pointed out, the "conversive" idea
>is more than a little suspect, and I tend to wonder if the medieval
>grammarians didn't come up with the 4-part verbal system with two
>unconverted and two converted forms for the sake of symmetry.  In
>any case, I don't see enough phonological or syntactic evidence to
>convince me that there really is a "converted" qatal or a qatal with
>"waw-consecutive."  Now I'll duck...


Some statisticts: Looking at qatals with prefixed waw in 1st and 2nd person
singular, I found 1637 examples in BHS. Of these, 1222 had ultimate stress
(including 83 of the lamed aleph and lamed he groups), and 415 had
penultimate stress (including 278 of the lamed aleph and lamed he groups).
Of the verbs with ultimate stress 1082 evidently have future meaning, and
of the verbs with penultimate stress 148 evidently have future meaning.

The fact that 12 per cent of the weqatals with penultimate stress do not
have a future meaning and that 36 per cent of the weqatals with penultimate
stress have future meaning accords with Dave's suggestions above.


Regards
Rolf


Rolf Furuli
Lecturer in Semitic languages
University of Oslo