Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Dave Washburn" <dwashbur AT nyx.net>]

> 
> >>Not sure if I should even ask this...has anybody ever heard of a 
> >>theory that Hebrew has no verbs at all?
> 
> Not such an odd question. We often take the grammatical categories of our
> own language and attempt to impose them on other languages. Many
> languages don't have "definitie articles" as we have in English and
> Hebrew.
> 
> The English forms "I ate, I have eaten, I was eating" are also not
> paralleled in other languages.
> 
> So we need to examine our assumption that our categories automatically
> fit onto other languages.

True, but this suggestion was that there are *no* verbs at all.  I 
couldn't help wondering: if that's the case, why has so much been 
written about the Hebrew Verbal System, including the lead article 
in the current "Hebrew Studies"?!?!?!?!  I suspect that the person 
who made this statement misunderstood something that was said, 
probably a long time ago, WRT Hebrew verbless clauses.  I'm 
following up on it from that angle, but I wanted to know if anybody 
had heard any such theory ever propounded.

Dave Washburn
http://www.nyx.net/~dwashbur
A Bible that's falling apart means a life that isn't.