Biblical Hebrew Forum

[peter_kirk AT SIL.ORG]

Dear Rolf,

Thank you. But I am not convinced about Turkish: just to rename the
Turkish present tense (from its morpheme) "Suffix-yor" does not stop
it being a morphologically marked present tense. Now one might argue
that the marking has functions other than present e.g. continuous, and
I don't know Turkish deeply enough to argue that one. (On one side,
-du/-di is simple past tense and -yor-du is continuous past or
imperfective; on the other hand, there is no separate non-continuous
present tense in Turkish). I have to suspect Dahl or Olsen of forced
interpretation here.

I accept your argument on the Russian example, but then you have to be
sure that certain uses of Hebrew wayyiqtols are not similarly
idiomatic. The examples with hendiadys I mentioned recently (Lambdin
section 173) may be in this category, also perhaps the poetic use of
two contrasting tenses to indicate complete coverage of time, which
Bryan mentioned (which I found in Ps 2:1,2, though not with
wayyiqtol).

Certainly 500 convincing cases of non-past wayyiqtol will be an
impressive collection - assuming that that is not 490 examples of the
same idiom or something like that. That makes a big difference from
the one or two examples of a usage which people sometimes quote,
especially when these are open to other interpretation. Even if the
interpretation seems somewhat forced (especially if a quite different
one is traditional), it is very hard for us to be sure of what was
meant in a particular sentence. Suppose we had an equivalent to your
German "strahlendes Wetter" example in Hebrew, and no native speakers
to ask about it. Then we would have no way of being sure about it. If
traditionally it had been interpreted as heavy rain (e.g. because the
LXX translators had made a mistake), but someone then proposed that it
means sunshine, we might easily easily accuse them of forced
interpretation, but they would be right. But I would agree that if we
start putting different forced interpretations on a whole list of
verses, perhaps our method is suspect.

Peter Kirk



______________________________ Reply Separator 
_________________________________
Subject: Re[2]: Alviero: tense and time
Author:  furuli AT online.no at internet
Date:    24/02/1999 15:54


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.

<snip>

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