Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Peter_Kirk AT SIL.ORG]

Thank you, Dave.

I am still not convinced. I looked at your: "I went to the store.  I 
got some bread.  I forgot my checkbook.  I put the bread back.  I went 
home." and thought "that's not good English". Well, I can hardly make a 
value judgment about what you write after what I said a few days ago! 
But I think your usage of "forgot" would not have been fully acceptable 
in the British English dialect of my school English teachers; they 
would have preferred "had forgotten", and in their dialect the past 
simple, at least in a simple string of clauses, implies sequentiality. 
Perhaps in contemporary US English what you write is quite acceptable.

But the point is not English but Hebrew. I would suggest that the 3% of 
cases of non-sequential wayyiqtol may reflect non-standard dialects 
(e.g. the Moabite one person contributed) and/or less than careful 
choice of words (I'm trying carefully to choose words here!).

It seems clear that within one language different dialects vary in how 
precisely they specify their verb forms e.g. British English 
(especially in older literature) is more precise than US English, 
classical Greek was more precise than NT Grrek. So, in your model, 
would these dialects differ in whether certain distinctions are 
semantic or pragmatic? Yet the dialect differences can be very subtle. 
The precise distinction between semantics and pragmatics may be 
important for your theory, but pragmatically (in the less technical 
sense of the word) I wonder if it makes a real difference.

Peter Kirk