Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Bryan Rocine" <brocine AT earthlink.net>]

Dear Peter,

The relative time idea that we are referring to here, at
least as far as my book is concerned, applies to *dependent*
(or subordinate) clauses only, in which there are two
"tenses," the qatal, which refers to the past relative to
the event time of the main clause and the yiqtol, which
refers to the non-past relative to the event time of the
main clause.  This ala Revell's HUCA article 3.2-3, DeCaen's
dissertation 6.6.2 and 8.2.

You may care to note that Niccacci has somewhat of an
expanded view of subordination than many, viewing
subordination as a syntactic as well as grammatical
phenomenon.  E.g. vav-X-qatal is subordinate to wayyiqtol,
the mainline.

Waltke and O'Connor put forth a nice set of examples of
terem-yiqtols in 31.6c.  I note that the yiqtol refers in
these examples to what is past relative to the speaker's
time but non-past relative to the event time of the main
clause. e.g. Jos 3:1 vayalnu sham terem ya`aboru.

Shalom,
Bryan

you wrote;

> Thank you for your posting. I haven't seen Bryan's book,
and he has
> kept out of this thread. So it seems that my idea is not
so far from
> what others are saying, despite Rolf trying to make it
seem totally
> hare-brained. Perhaps you or Bryan can point me and Rolf
in the
> direction of some more background to Bryan's "relative
non-past" idea.
>
> In fact Niccacci seems to say something similar: "We can
affirm that
> verb forms have FIXED TEMPORAL REFERENCE when they are
verbal
> sentences and/or indicate the mainline of communication
both in
> narrative and in direct speech. On the other hand, they
have a
> RELATIVE TEMPORAL REFERENCE when they are nominal clauses
and indicate
> a subsidiary line of communication." (By "nominal clause"
Niccacci
> seems to mean any clause which does not begin with a verb
(or W- plus
> verb). So he would I think call B:+EREM + YIQTOL
"nominal", though
> +EREM is hardly a noun.) (A. Niccacci, "On the Hebrew
Verbal System",
> in Bergen (ed.) "Biblical Hebrew and Discourse
Linguistics",
> Eisenbrauns 1994). But no further explanation is given in
this brief
> article.
>
> I know I'm not really addressing Rolf's question. That's
one reason
> why I changed the subject line. I am rather putting a
different
> interpretation of the basic facts (a much simpler one)
from the one
> which is implied in his question. On my interpretation,
his question
> (at least as far as it is based on Jeremiah 47:1) becomes
meaningless.
>
> Peter Kirk
>
>
> ______________________________ Reply Separator
_________________________________
> Subject: Re[3]: Can Hebrew "tense" be relative to context
not dei
> Author:  <zellmer AT digitelone.com> at Internet
> Date:    06/10/1999 07:34
>
>
> Peter,
>
> While I am not sure your current topic is really
addressing Rolf's
> question, I don't think we have to go to all these
examples from other
> languages to answer the question posed in your thread
subject.  Rocine
> classifies qatals in dependent clauses as "relative  past
background,"
> relative to the event time (not the deictic time) of the
verb.
> Similarly, he classifies yiqtols in dependent clauses as
"relative
> non-past background," thus leaving open the question of
present or
> future to be answered on a case-by-case basis.
>
> HTH,
>
> Paul
>


B. M. Rocine
Associate Pastor
Living Word Church
6101 Court St. Rd.
Syracuse, NY 13206

(office) 315.437.6744
(home) 315.479.8267