Biblical Hebrew Forum

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

Peter, 
> 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.

Well, then let's make it a little smoother: "I went to the store and 
got some bread, but I forgot my checkbook so I put the bread back 
and went home."  This, as far as I know, is acceptable "standard" 
US English.

> 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!).

And doing a good job ;-)  It seems to me that, in order to show this, 
it would be necessary to examine where the 3% occur, how the 
examples are grouped (if they are grouped at all) and demonstrate 
that a particular part of the corpus shows a tendency toward a 
dialect that uses the WP in such and such a way.  From what I 
know of these "exceptions," this would be difficult to do.

> 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.

To me it doesn't make a difference.  I'd be looking at dialectical 
differences at the syntactic level.  And the distinction between 
semantics and pragmatics really doesn't affect my theory at all. 
Dave Washburn
http://www.nyx.net/~dwashbur
A Bible that's falling apart means a life that isn't.