Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Rolf Furuli <furuli AT online.no>]

Peter Kirk wrote:


>Dear Rolf,
>
>Many thanks for your succinct description of your method, which has
>clarified several things which I was not understanding before. It
>makes me regret that I had to use a somewhat negative tone in my last
>posting on this subject.
>
>I am left with just this concern. It seems that no-one else on the
>list accepts your arguments. I think this is because they, like me, do
>not agree with your generalisation from a few minimal pairs that
>"WAYYIQTOL and YIQTOL behave similarly as far as ET/RT is concerned,
>and QATAL and WEQATAL behave similarly". But, as you have now made
>clear, the questions you have recently been putting to the list
>recently expect those who reply to implicitly accept this part of your
>conclusion, which underlies your mapping from verb paradigms to
>aspects. Therefore those (all of us, it seems) who do not accept your
>conclusion are ruled out from answering your question. So please do
>not claim that your conclusions are confirmed by the fact that no-one
>refuted them in answer to your questions.

>

Dear Peter,


A list as b-hebrew is not the place to present huge amounts of data; the
place for that is a dissertation. My thesis will be published in the
future, and after reading it one is in a better position to express a
reasoned agreement or disagreement.

The disagreement between me and several members of the list regarding
Hebrew verbs primarily relates to method. I insist on a scrupulous
distinction between "semantic meaning" and "conversational pragmatic
implicature", and I follow the principle from the natural sciences to break
everything down to the smallest units and then study these units. The
approaches of others, it seems to me, is primarily built on induction. A
difference in method often give different results.

To answer my question regarding the force of conjunctions does not require
any agreement. So I would like to stress that no member of the list has
been able to, or has wanted to demonstrate that the WA(YY)- element of
WAYYIQTOL has a characteristic or force different from that of the
conjunction WAW+YIQTOL. Thus no material has been presented showing that my
view that this WA(YY)- element is a simple conjunction is wrong.

You wrote in your previous post:

<Here is a different argument which you might like to falsify: There
<were two distinct Semitic verb paradigms with consonantal forms like
<YQTL, one a preterite (as in Ugaritic) which has survived in Hebrew as
<WAYYIQTOL and (perhaps) jussive and the other a non-past form which
<has survived in Hebrew as non-apocopated YIQTOL. For the moment, let
<us rule out Occam's razor as an argument here on the grounds that
<there is good evidence for distinct YQTL forms in cognate languages.

The first question we have to ask when we start to investigate the
possibilities you mention is: Those who "found" this old apocopated
preterite in Ugaritic, Accadian and elsewhere, did they systematically
differentiate between preterite (grammaticalized past tense) and past
meaning? If they did not, their claim of seeing a preterite is suspect. Did
they make such a distinction, Peter?



Regards
Rolf


Rolf Furuli
Lecturer in Semitic languages
University of oslo