Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Doug Kasten <doug.kasten AT juno.com>]

Peter,

Hello again.  I'm following your discussion of  ):A$ER with Moon since a
number of issues concerning the word and the subordinated clauses have
held my interest.

1) Regarding the thread you and Moon have been following:  I'm waiting to
verify the fact that, as Moon claims, Korean has no relative pronoun! 
Just because Hebrew's relative pronoun doesn't act like that of English
doesn't mean it's not a relativizer of some kind.  It's hard for me to
believe that Korean doesn't have any relativization at all! --but I'll
listen.  And since it seems to me that ):A$ER relativizes in some way so
I'll continue to refer to it as such.  Its idiosyncracies do, however,
make me think that it is something other than an English relative.

2) On to something a bit new.  You say below: " Do 
verbs in ):A$ER clauses act as if they were sentence-initial verbs?"

I looked at the use of yiqtol and qatal forms following ):A$ER in
Leviticus 1-7 and Numbers 20-25.  Not all forms were immediately
following ):A$ER (i.e. they were X-qatal following the relative).  There
were exceptions, though very few and I thought otherwise explainable, but
the qatals struck me as realis (past time, pluperfect) and the yiqtols as
irrealis (future, modal) or indicating habitual behavior/events.  As I
said, there were some problems and my analysis in this paragraph is
obviously inadequate, but considering the debate on this list, I found
the uniformity of qatal/yiqtol uses striking and will continue to observe
these forms.

My thought is somewhat where you go with it, Peter.  Though I don't focus
on sentence-initial, I'm very curious as to the uniformity of meaning and
am wondering if following ):A$ER we don't get a more 'fundamental'
('pure'?) look at the basic meanings of qatal and yiqtol.

Looking forward to hearing you out on this.

Peace,
Doug
On Mon, 22 Mar 1999 11:06:16 -0500 peter_kirk AT SIL.ORG writes:
>Dear Moon,
>
>Yes, I think we are getting there now. I thought of "such" as an 
>English equivalent, but "such a house" means "a similar house" rather 
>than "the house", "such that" is perhaps better though not quite 
>right. But then we should not expect a direct equivalent.
>
>Then I thought of another issue which I don't have time to explore. If 
>
>):A$ER is not part of the subordinate clause and is followed by the 
>verb of the subordinate clause, that makes the subordinate clause 
>verb-initial. That has an impact on the semantics of verb forms. Do 
>verbs in ):A$ER clauses act as if they were sentence-initial verbs?
>
>Peter Kirk
>
>
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