Biblical Hebrew Forum

[mjoseph <mjoseph AT terminal.cz>]

Peter Kirk queried:

>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 think Peter has put his virtual finger on the heart of the problem, 
something that has been bothering me ever since this "what is the 
all-encompassing function of the wayyiqtol, into which every one of its 
usages can plausibly be placed" question first came up.

I trust that nearly everyone on this list speaks at least one language in 
addition to his or her native tongue. Given that, I'm sure you have 
noticed that (1) living languages, that is, all spoken languages outside 
of Esperanto, are *not* 100% regular in their usage of certain 
grammatical constructions; (2) nor could they be expected to be regular, 
given the obvious fact that spoken languages change through time, and (3) 
the greatest degree of irregularity occurs in relation to the most common 
features of the language (be, was, been; but interpolate, interpolated, 
interpolated).

Given that wayyiqtol is nothing if not common in Biblical Hebrew, is 
there any reason to think that "one all-encompassing function" is 
anything other than a chimera?

Mark Joseph