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  • From: peter_kirk AT SIL.ORG
  • To: b-hebrew AT franklin.oit.unc.edu
  • Subject: Re[3]: 2Ki 20:7 and Isa 38:21
  • Date: Wed, 10 Mar 1999 00:51:38 -0500


Dear Rolf,

Thank you for your reply (snipped from below to save everyone's
bandwidth). I realise that I have not fully understood your model and
terminology, but let me try to reply to you trying to use simplified
terminology which I and others may understand better.

If I understand you rightly, you are explaining wayyiqtol/qatal
doublets by saying that wayyiqtol and qatal are forms with
fundamentally very different meanings, but also very broad "domains of
meaning", covering almost all possible verb meanings it seems, so that
in certain contexts one can be substituted by the other with no change
of pragmatic implicature. That is possible, but surely Hebrew must be
very ambiguous if the commonest verb forms can be used with almost in
almost any pragmatic situation. My explanation would be that wayyiqtol
and qatal are fundamentally quite similar in meaning, and so not
surprisingly it is common that one can be substituted by the other.
That is, their "domains of meaning" can overlap without covering
almost the whole semantic field of verb meanings. Of course there are
contexts where rather different verb forms can be substituted, e.g.
wayyiqtol vs. infinitive construct in your Isaiah 37:15 and 2 Kings
19:15 example. But I would expect this to be relatively rare with
fundamentally very different verb forms e.g. qatal and yiqtol, for
which you count 6 examples.

I understand well your often-stated argument that the difference
between wayyiqtol and weyiqtol is artificial and late. I disagree
because I see two distinct meanings: wayyiqtol as perfective and
generally sequential, collocating with qatal; weyiqtol as imperfective
and collocating with yiqtol. But (as I have said before) there may
have been some cases in which the distinction between the two forms,
so similar in sound, had been lost before the time of the Masoretes or
was incorrectly reconstructed by them. That is the simplest
explanation of the wayyiqtol/weyiqtol doublet in 2 Samuel 22 and Psalm
18, and perhaps of a number of other non-past wayyiqtols (not of
course all the non-sequential ones we argued about recently). On the
other hand, I have also argued recently on this list that poetry may
have a different use of verb forms from prose because it represents a
different stage of development of Hebrew, and no-one has answered my
argument. In my recent posting I was considering mainly prose as in
the 2 Kings and Isaiah passages in question. The statistics may work
differently in poetry. I would be interested in a breakdown of the
ones you gave between prose and poetry.

You wrote: "Because the supposed opposition between yiqtol/weyiqtol
and wayyiqtol is non-orthographic and is based upon the function of
the forms, we must demand that a difference of function is
consistently followed throughout the Bible." Why? Well, I don't accept
the premise, as the Masoretes did not invent the vowel points but
wrote them in according to a tradition of reciting. But even if the
Masoretes added the pointing themselves, why do we have to demand
complete consistency? They did work remarkably accurately, but as I am
finding in my translation project, even with modern computer aids it
is very difficult to get consistency of verb forms etc right through
the Bible. Perhaps the 2 Samuel 22 and Psalm 18 differences and many
of your others were simply the Masoretes' errors? Don't build too much
on one or two dots!

Peter Kirk


______________________________ Reply Separator
_________________________________
Subject: Re[2]: 2Ki 20:7 and Isa 38:21
Author: furuli AT online.no at internet
Date: 08/03/1999 16:37





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