Biblical Hebrew Forum

[peter_kirk AT SIL.ORG]

Dear Moon,

You wrote:

Dear Peter, 
I really enjoyed many threads on Hebrew verb forms, 
of which you have been active participants. Many thanks for
that. Your conclusion seems to be:

>that "Sequentiality is not the semantic meaning of 
> wayyiqtol," but rather that wayyiqtol is the default unmarked past 
> tense, which is usually but not always sequential by pragmatic 
> implicature

If we ignore stative verbs in English, English simple past
verbs behave similarly as wayyiqtol, don't they?

Respectfully
Moon-Ryul Jung
Assistant Professor
Dept of Computer Science
Soongsil University
Seoul, Korea

============

Thank you for your kind words. We discussed earlier the comparison 
with English, and yes, I think we agreed that in general, apart from 
statives, the same statement applies to the English simple past tense. 
That doesn't mean that wayyiqtol should always be translated by an 
English past, but it would be in most cases, where there is no special 
marking.

Peter Kirk