Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Henry Churchyard <churchyh AT ccwf.cc.utexas.edu>]

> Date: Mon, 19 Jul 1999 09:27:28 -0700
> Author: "Dave Washburn" <dwashbur AT nyx.net>
> Subject: The form of weqatal

> For some time I had doubts that there was such a thing as a separate
> weqatal conjugation, mostly because there's nothing really phonetic
> to distinguish it from the simple qatal with a simple conjunction (I
> have doubts about the validity of the occasional accent shift, and
> even if it's accurate it's only an occasional phenomenon).

Do you mean "occasional" in the sense of occurring only in
1st. sg. and 2nd. masc. sg., or in the sense of being phonologically
blocked in pause, and before words beginning with a main-stressed
syllable, or in the sense of stress-shift not correlating with
semantics according to your theory?

> So here's what I'm wondering, and I'm hoping some of you comparative
> semiticists can help me: is it possible at all that this form, in BH
> times, was pronounced differently than the Masoretes pointed it?
> Specifically, I'm wondering if there's any possibility that it used
> an A-class vowel and gemination along the lines of the wayyiqtol?
> So e.g. in Gen 40:13 we would have, rather than W:NFTAT.F, perhaps
> something like WAN.FTAT.F with the geminating prefix.  Is this
> completely off the wall, or could such a thing be possible?

There's no particular evidence for it; and really, the conjunction in
w@qatal is the plain old ordinary everyday boring form of the
conjunction, which doesn't seem to need any special explanation,
while it's the form of the conjunction in wayyiqtol which is
mysterious, and still not adequately explained historically/etymologically.
In chapter 4 of my dissertation, I discuss the form of w@qatal and its
relationship to the form of wayyiqtol, but I don't have any stunning
hypotheses about the cause of the difference between the forms of the
conjunction; the main thing I observe is that wayyiqtol originated as
a very old Semitic tense, and shows relic phonology of various types
(though the wayy- form of the conjunction is only attested in Hebrew,
as far as I know), while w@qatal as a separate morphological/phonological
entity is a recent analogous innovation that doesn't show "deep"
phonological alternations.

An excerpt of the dissertation (including Chapter 4) is available as
a 350k .ZIP-compressed Adobe Acrobat .PDF file from URL
http://ccwf.cc.utexas.edu/~churchyh/c1-4xcpt.zip

--
         --Henry Churchyard     churchyh AT ccwf.cc.utexas.edu