Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Rolf Furuli <furuli AT online.no>]

Dear Peter,

I give up, because I see no possibility for further logical exchange of
ideas. We live in two different worlds.

Regards
 Rolf


>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
>
>
>
>
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