Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Rolf Furuli <furuli AT online.no>]

Dear Peter,

See below:


>Dear Rolf,
>
>I agree that this thread is running out of steam, and I thank you for
>giving me a lot of help from it. I think we understand one another a
>lot better now, and we are not as far apart as we might have thought,
>for a lot of the differences were in definition. I hope you can now
>get on with your new semester without too much distraction from this
>list.

I think this has been a fine thread, and as you express, I see we are much
closer than I earlier believed.

>
>However, there do remain some differences of substance, related to
>your newly introduced material on other Semitic languages. Now I am
>not an expert on this. So let me ask a question to you or to others. I
>have read that there was a prefix conjugation preterit in Ugaritic as
>well as in Akkadian. Is that a general opinion? I understand that this
>has not been proved to your satisfaction on your theory - I don't see
>that it could be, especially given the limited and unvocalised corpus
>of Ugaritic. But am I right in saying that in Ugaritic and Akkadian
>there is a "short" prefix form (one of the ones listed as
>"subjunctive" below) commonly used in what appears to be narrative,
>with no clear indication of modality in the context, just as WAYYIQTOL
>is used in Hebrew narrative? If so, I think that must be a strong
>argument for a distinction between two prefix forms going back to
>proto-Semitic, one of which is "imperfective" and the other (apart
>from its modal uses) is something like a preterit. You wrote: "There
>can be little doubt that the line of demarcation in the verbal systems
>of the Semitic languages is drawn between
>prefix-conjugation/suffix-conjugation." But to me, this evidence puts
>a very large measure of doubt on this statement.

It is correct that both Ugaritic and Accadian each have a short YQTL which
is termed "preterit". Ugaritic is more difficult to handle than Accadian
because of the lack of vowels. The contrast between the short and long form
in Ugaritic is the ending (YQTL vs YQTLW) while the difference in Accadian
is a vowel (which is seen in the script) and gemination, (IPRUS v s
IPARRAS). A parallel has been drawn between these short forms ( Ugaritic:
YQTL, Accadian a IPRUS and Hebrew WAYYIQTOL /because H. tends to use the
short form, though not allways/), and I agree (and I also add the short
YENGER (vs YENAGGER) of Ge'ez) . They are all short forms and they are all
to a great extent used with past reference, and in addition - all (Ugaritic
YQTL is somewhat ambiguous in this respect) are the stems used for modality.

The nestor of Accadian grammarians Wolfram von Soden wrote ("Grundriss der
Akkadischen Grammatik", 1952, p 99) regarding IPRUS, IPARRAS etc:

"Die als "Tempora" bezeichneten Formkategorien des Verbums dienten primär
nicht dem Ausdruck relativer Zeitstufen wie weithin unsere Tempusformen,
sondern den Ausdruck von Aktionsarten und anderen nicht
zeitstufengebundenen Modifikationen des Verbalbegriffs."

In Oslo there are a group of teachers who each week read different Accadian
texts, and being particularly sensitive for verbal nuances, it becomes
clearer and clearer to me that the "preterit" designation (=grammaticalized
past tense) is a misnomer, bacause the form can be used for the
present/future as well.

Regarding the Ugaritic "preterit" T.L. Fenton, 1963 "The Ugaritic Verbal
System" (Doctoral thesis), pp 56,82, found 561 examples of YQTL  with past
meaning, 191 with future meaning, and 70 with past continuous meaning. The
Ge'ez YENGER  can similarly be used for past, present, and future, and the
same is true regarding Hebrew WAYYIQTOL. As long as nobody has made a
scientific study from the point of view of "past tense versus past meaning"
in any of the four languages, it is very doubtful to claim that *any* of
these forms is a preterit.

A very interesting and most challenging fact is that in all four languages
morphological forms that to a great extent are used with past reference are
the very forms used to express the subjunctive, optative and vetitive
(negative "jussive") moods. This is a matter I will study thoroughly in the
future to reach a conclusion, but so far it seems likely that these short
forms (including WAYYIQTOL) *are* subjunctives. At first sight this seems
very strange. How can narrative accounts which are the hallmark of
indicative expression to a great extent be expressed by forms that are
modal? Galia's model, if it be correct, could solve this problem by
equating the -AY- element  of WAYYIQTOL with the definite article. However,
no such solution is available for Accadian and Ge'ez.

If my view of WAYYIQTOL  as a simple WAW+YIQTOL (imperfective aspect) be
true, and the end of the events simply is ignored by the verb but suggested
by the conjunction, Hebrew ( or rather, Semitic) narrative is of a very
special nature.
It seems to me that the line of demarcation between indicative and
injunctive (all kinds of modality) is somewhat differently drawn in the
Semitic languages compared with Indo-European ones. That is, some
expressions which in the Indo-European languages are indicative are
included in the modal category in the Semitic languages. One promising area
for study to approach a solution, is the study of *speech acts* ( See J.R.
Searle, 1979, Expression and Meaning  Studies in the theory of Speech acts,
Cambridge) which can be viewed as modal expressions. (Regarding different
kinds of modality I recommend F.R. Palmer, 1986, "Mood and Modality",
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.). A study of the use of the
negatives  )L and L) of cohortative (with WAYYIQTOL  and other verbs) and
different modal particles can help us understand what is included in Hebrew
injunctive.


>
>If you ask, how could this improbable situation have arisen, let me
>speculate into the prehistory of Semitic, to a time when most verb
>forms were (rather like in English) not inflected for person, but the
>person was indicated by a pronoun before the verb. Perhaps at that
>time there were two basic verb forms, something like QTUL for non-past
>and QTULU for past. There was also (to speculate) a participle form
>something like QATAL used for more stative situations, and for some
>reason the word ordering was that the personal pronoun came after the
>participle. Perhaps the 1st person plural personal pronoun was
>something like NA. So we had forms NA QTUL non-past and NA QTULU past,
>and QATAL NA as an alternative for stative situations. Join the words
>together, and you get close to the b-Hebrew situation with three basic
>forms rather than two. Just speculation, I know, but sometimes it is
>useful to speculate to get around the type of argument that "this
>situation could not have arisen" which you like to use.
>

Your guess regarding the hypothetical "Proto-Semitic" is just as good as
mine. A comparison of the Semitic languages that we know, can be
profitable, but  studies a la Bauer and others are not recommending
themselves to me.




Regards

Rolf


Rolf Furuli
University of Oslo