Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Rolf Furuli <furuli AT online.no>]

Mark Joseph wrote:


>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?
>

Dear Mark,

Before you ask your chimera question, you ought to ask another question:
"Is there a wayyiqtol-conjugation at all in Hebrew? There is no question
that the prefix conjugation together with  wa is the form used in mainline
narrative, but we do not find the same consistent  pattern in non-narrative
texts. So how can we know that the "consistent" use of wayyiqtol in
narrative simply is not a linguistic convention which has nothing to do
with semantic meaning? We have to go to the building stones of the Hebrew
verbal system before we make a theory about its overall structure. I work
with Hebrew texts in the classroom several days a week, and it is very
difficult for me to understand that other teachers who work with the same
texts are not able to see that problems are lurking under almost every
stone we turn if the traditional four-component model with grammaticalized
tenses be the criterion. Others teaching Hebrew, who are on the list,
please speak up!

We need not make statistics of the regularity of Hebrew and other languages
(all languages have some irregularities); all we need to do is to compare
all verbs in an a set of verses ( such as already mentioned, Isaiah 40-45,
Ps 107 and Ps 18/2 Sam 22), and  ascertain whether the traditional model
makes sense.


Regards
Rolf

Rolf Furuli
Lecturer in Semitic languages
University of Oslo