Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Rolf Furuli <furuli AT online.no>]

Dear Peter,


>In Turkish there is a present tense, a past tense, a future tense, and
>a "broad" ("genish") tense (sometimes confusingly called "aorist", but
>nothing like the Greek aorist) - there are also various other compound
>tenses. The "broad" tense can be present, future, or applicable at all
>times e.g. in proverbs. It is also morphologically the simplest, the
>others have distinct present, past and future morphemes. This looks to
>me like an example in which the present tense is just as marked as the
>past and future. You may at least like to look into this and see how
>it fits with the theory.

Broman Olsen (1997:130) writes: "In Dahl's /"Tense and Aspect systems"/
(1985) survey of 64 languages, no language marks simple present tense
morphologically; that is, no language has a form which has semantically
uncancellable present reference ( and no other function)."
Looking at Dahl's work, I found that he included Turkish, and he gives the
following information:
Turkish
Suffix-yor
Aorist
Past Definite
Future
Past Predicative Suffix
Reportative mood

From this it seems that Turkish does not have a morphologically marked
present tense.
>
>In Russian the clearly past form "poshli", the past tense of the verb
>"to go", is used idiomatically with the non-past meaning "let's go!".
>But this usage of the past tense is pretty much unique. Does this one
>usage make the Russian past tense non-semantic? Is the theory really
>that strict?

You have answered the question yourself by using the terms "past tense" and
"idiomatically". In Norwegian we idiomatically can say: "This tasted good"
or "The child was cute" when we mean "This tasts good" and "The child is
cute", but this is idiomatic, and nobody is confused as to which form is
marked for past and which is present. If we can show that a non-past use of
wayyiqtol is idiomatic or is a special case for one reason or another, its
past meaning is defended. Examples which cannot be explained this vay argue
against a preterite understanding.
>
>Is just one non-past wayyiqtol in the whole corpus really sufficient
>(quite apart from textual doubts) to invalidate the suggestion that
>wayyiqtol is semantically past? Do real human languages really follow
>any rules quite that strictly?

I used the words "in principle" together with "one non-past wayyiqtol",
exactly because human languages are not allways "mathematical".  However,
when my research project regarding Hebrew verbs is finished, I expect to
have a list of at least 500 wayyiqtols which fulfill the strictest criteria
for being non-past, and another list of perhaps 500 which most probably are
non-past. A few hundred examples will in my eyes be enough.

Lastly, a long-drawn sigh. Let us not defend a system by any means, and let
us put some constraint upon our ways of interpretation.  Consider the
following German sentence: "Heute ist strahlendes Wetter." When I argue
that this means that the sun is shining, one could say that he understands
it to mean that it is raining, because we have the word "Wasserstrahl", and
he views heavy rain as squirts of water. The interpretation is not
completely impossible, but it is very,very forced.  Sometimes, we have (at
least I am feeling this way), such "Wasserstrahl-interpretations" on the
list, so let us exercise some more discretion (I write this to you because
I cannot remember such an incidence in your posts.).

Regards
Rolf

Rolf Furuli
Lecturer in Semitic languages
University of Oslo