Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Rolf Furuli <furuli AT online.no>]

Paul Zellmer wrote:
>>
>
>Dear Rolf,
>
>If you wanted to claim that I may not be seeing *your* real issue in the
>study of
>Hebrew verbs, you might have a case.  I would take issue with that, having
>read your
>submissions over the past years and understanding them enough to see even
>the shifts
>of position that you have made.  You, on the other hand, obviously do not
>understand
>my boat illustration, which is most likely my fault for not identifying
>the elements.
>The *boat* is not the verb forms; the *strokes* are.
>
>
>I have just re-read a paper by Fanning where he reminded he reader that
>focussing on
>difficult cases make for bad laws.  I see no problem with Alviero's stated
>position
>that he wanted to start with the unambiguous before moving to the
>ambiguous.  It seems
>like good practice that covers many fields of endeavors.

Dear Paul,

I do not think it is profitable for the list that we continue this
discussion, but I hope that some sides of the real issue have become
clearer. I use this opportunity to make som concluding remarks.

If I remember correctly, you have a background in engineering, and
therefore you are familiar with the methods of the natural sciences. In the
16th century, Francis Bacon thought that all there was to science was to
gather a set of data, and a scientific law would emerge, more or less by
itself.  Carl Popper has shown (though some believe his principles are too
strict) that modern science basically proceeds by falsification and not by
confirmation.

My approach to Hebrew linguistics follows to a great degree the two basic
principles of the natural sciences:
(1) Break everything down to the smallest possible parts and study each part.
(2) Confirmative data suggest what may be true but can never prove it,
contradictory data falsify and disprove theories.

I will illustrate the issue by discussing time/tense. All people have (and
have had) a consciousness of past, present, and future time, but all
languages do not have tenses, i.e. verb forms which exclusively code for a
particular time related to a deictic point. I start with the properties
(+past) and (+future), and ask: Do we find these in Classical Hebrew?

The Baconian approach would be to make some statistics regarding the
particular verb forms, and regarding WAYYIQTOL conclude that because 90>%
percent of its occurrences have past meaning, it must code for past tense.
The Popperian approach would be to study all the wayyiqtols, and conclude
that >10% with non-past meaning falsify the theory that WAYYIQTOL is a past
tense. (The "difficult cases" that you claim "make for bad laws" are
"difficult" because the present theory cannot account for them; in reality
they are simple cases that falsify the theory.)

Language is not completely comparable with the matter studied by the
natural sciences, because a measure of subjectivity is inherrent in
language. I therefore cannot just count falsifying examples but must
evaluate them. (This is also the reason why I strongly reject an a priori
claim that verbs have different meaning in different genres.) This means
that I have to make diachronic studies, I have to study the characteristics
of different genres, and I have to try to find the relationship between the
dialect of the writer and the language of the text he wrote etc. All this
includes induction which also permeates Baconian logic, so I do not reject
that, but it plays a secondary role (cf double-blind tests in medicine
which are based on induction, but are believed to give good results). When
I find a reasonable number of examples of WAYYIQTOLS with non-past meaning,
and these in no way are strange or special, I conclude that they falsify
the preterite theory.

The principle of falsification may even work better in linguistics than in
the natural sciences. If we falsify one theory and there are 100 other
possibilities, we have not achieved much (cf. Duhem's problem). But if
there are just two possible answers and we falsify one, the other *must*
represent the truth, even though the limitations of induction prevents us
from positively proving that this answer is true.
Regarding WAYYIQTOL and tense, there are just two possibilities, either it
is past tense or it is not. So the Hebrew verbs readily lend themself to a
Popperian test.

I suggest that anyone doing research on Hebrew verbs should start with a
study of the principles of the philosophy of science and make an in-depth
study of confirmation versus falsification. This may even throw some light
on the greatest mystery of Hebrew lingustics (this is how I see it) ,
namely, how people can believe in and rely on an explanation of verb forms
which only works for a part of the text (narrative) and not for all the
verbs of the whole corpus.



Regards
Rolf



Rolf Furuli
Lecturer in Semitic languages
University of Oslo