Biblical Hebrew Forum

[peter_kirk AT SIL.ORG]

Dear Rolf,

You now seem to be presupposing the answer in your question. This is 
like asking "If chalk and cheese are the same thing, what is the 
difference between chalk and cheese?" Well, possibly chalk and cheese 
are the same thing, but you need to demonstrate this fully rather than 
try to get people to appear to agree with you by answering "nothing" 
to the above meaningless question. Now the arguments from Origen etc 
which you put forward are interesting though not new, and weakened by 
the fact that Origen probably knew little Hebrew. But if I see chalk 
almost always by the blackboard and cheese almost always in the dining 
room, even if they look rather similar, it does suggest that they are 
actually not the same thing.

John wrote: "it could be something analogous to the etymological falacy 
to assume that the original function was preserved by BH speakers and 
writers". Good point. Let me clarify my tentative suggestion, that the 
derivation of wayyiqtol from w + article + yiqtol is primarily 
morphological, an alternative to Rolf's suggestion that wayyiqtol is 
simply a Masoretic variant of weyiqtol. The suggestion linking 
definiteness with perfectivity is even more speculative. It is clear 
that the difference between weyiqtol and wayyiqtol is at the most very 
distantly analogous to that between nouns with and without the article. 
Prof. Niccacci rightly wrote: "Thus, it is a verbform on its own right. 
This means, among other things, that it is not a waw+yiqtol [nor, I 
would add waw+article+yiqtol - PK], it is a wayyiqtol."

Peter Kirk


______________________________ Reply Separator 
_________________________________ Subject: Re: The conjunction "and" 
and sequence.
Author:  furuli AT online.no at internet 
Date:    12/03/1999 15:04


<snip>

Dear Dave,

It seems that I still have not managed to express my question in an 
understandable way. I am aware that the functions of those forms which are 
pointed as wayyiqtols and those which are pointed as weyiqtols in MT 
generally are different.  But I also know that there is no difference 
between the forms in unpointed texts and that Origen did not differentiate 
between wayyiqtols and weyiqtols, but all forms have an initial ou in his 
manuscripts. What I want to explore, therefore, is whether the difference 
between wayyiqtol and weyiqtol is semantic or pragmatic. We must remember 
that the morphologic difference between the two forms need not be great, it 
need not be more than the difference between patah and shewa, which would be 
a very small difference. An example is ma-yyfgel  in Psalm 21:2: Is the 
reason for the gemination and retraction of stress only the patah after mem 
or is it something else?

There is the possibility that the Masoretes used two vowels, which in their 
eyes where almost identical (there is much evidence that shewa often was 
pronounces as an "a" in Masoretic times), one for narratives and the other 
for other situations, and that the great difference that seems to be 
between the two can be ruduced to something very small. On this background 
I do not ask whether there is a functional difference between wayyiqtols 
and weyiqtols in MT, this is clear.  But if we leave alone everything we 
know about wayyiqtol and weyiqtol, and just ask. Is there any function of 
wayyiqtol which would not be accounted for if the prefix was just a 
conjunction and nothing more? We do not need statistics or discussions to 
answer this question. All we need, is to point to one side of wayyiqtol 
that requires more than a simple conjunction. So far, nobody has done that.


Regards
Rolf


Rolf Furuli
Lecturer in Semitic languages
University of Oslo




---
You are currently subscribed to b-hebrew as: Peter_Kirk AT sil.org 
To unsubscribe, forward this message to 
$subst('Email.Unsub')
To subscribe, send an email to join-b-hebrew AT franklin.oit.unc.edu.