Skip to Content.
Sympa Menu

b-hebrew - Re: Re[8]: Gen 4:1, X + qatal (Peter)

b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org

Subject: Biblical Hebrew Forum

List archive

Chronological Thread  
  • From: "Dave Washburn" <dwashbur AT nyx.net>
  • To: b-hebrew AT franklin.oit.unc.edu
  • Subject: Re: Re[8]: Gen 4:1, X + qatal (Peter)
  • Date: Fri, 12 Feb 1999 06:45:15 -0700


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.




Archive powered by MHonArc 2.6.24.

Top of Page