Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Galia Hatav <ghatav AT aall.ufl.edu>]

Dear Rolf Furuli,

You wrote:

>
>While I am sceptical about the claim that the definite article was
>incorporated into a verb form, I am open for arguments.

        I am sceptical, too, as it goes against any analysis of nounn
phrases (traditional, Chomskian or otherwise), but unless there is evidence
against it, thinking of a definite article as preceding a verb is not
impossible.

If you have written
>anything about it, I will be happy to consider it.

        I am planning to write an article this coming May (when we are done
with the Spring Semester). I would be real happy if agreed to read the ms.
and gave me your comments.

Allow me, however, to
>express my present views reagarding this question.


>
>As a matter of fact, there is no indication that the WAW prefixed to
>YIQTOLs is anything but a conjunction before the Masoretes pointed the
>text. It is also quite clear that the Masoretes wanted to distinguish
>between WAYYIQTOL  and WEYIQTOL,but the question is: What was the basis for
>this distinction? Let us look at example (1):
>
>(1) 2Kings 9:17 In Jezreel, the sentinel standing on the tower spied the
>company of Jehu arriving, and said (WAYYIQTOL), "I see a company." Joram
>said, "Take a horseman; send him to meet them, and let him say (WEYIQTOL),
>'Is it peace?'"
>
>When we consider this example, we should keep in mind that although we
>speak about an -AY- element in WAYYIQTOL, this is only descriptive. There
>is of course no such element existent, but the characteristic is
>*gemination* in 3. person forms and *compensatory lengthening* in 1 person.
>singualar.

        The desriptive part is that there is a vowel (patah) for <w> and
there is a dagesh geminating the prefix of <yiqtol>. In the case of first
person singular instead of short patah followed by dagesh we have a long
qamatz. Now comes the question of "why?". meaning the explanation part.
Following the traditional exlanation, I see the patah followed by a dagesh
and the parallel qamatz when a dagesh is impossible, as representing the
same morpheme. I called that morpheme <AY>, but it could be labelled
differently, e.g., <a:>. The point is that there is a morpheme anchoring
the situation to the actual world. What kind of morpheme is it,
phonologically speaking, is still to be determined. Consulting with a
phonologist it was suggested to me that it is a mora.

It is generally accepted that the Masoretes pointed their text
>on the basis of the recitation they heard in the synagogue, and that they
>were extremely careful not to add anything to the consonant text (and
>probably not to what they heard as well).
>
>Therefore, what did the Masoretes hear in the Synagogue? Evidence from
>Josephus and Origen, and from the Masoretes themselves suggest that shewa
>was generally pronounced by an "a"-sound just as patah, but shewa could
>also be colored by other vowels. If the intention was to distinguish
>between two different conjugations (WAYYIQTOL and WEYIQTOL) by help of the
>vocalization, shewa versus patah were the worst possible choice, because of
>their similarity. We therefore do not have any indication that the timbre
>of shewa and patah in the two verbs of (1) was different.

        There are different theses of how the vowels were prononounced (as
well as the consonants). I am trying to analyze the text as I see it, no
matter how the words were actually pronounced.

There is,
>however, one factor that would distinguish the two, namely stress. If now
>the Masoretes heard the two verbs being stressed differently, how would
>that affect vocalization?
>
>The WEYIQTOL has two open syllables and the last is closed. It has the
>normal ultimate stress, and because the closed syllable is stressed, the
>short patah is OK. The WAYYIQTOL, however, has penultimate stress, and this
>would, according to the phonetic laws, demand a different vocalization.
>Because of the stress, we either would have expected a pretonic qamets in
>the first syllable or a patah together with gemination; a shewa in a
>supposed open first open syllable before the stress, would not be expected.
>This means, as far as I can see, that a combination of the hearing of
>penultimate stress in the synagogue, and the phonetic laws applied by the
>Masoretes (I leave alone those verbs that can be apocopated), can account
>for all the differences between WAYYOMER  and W:YOMAR in (1). If this is
>true, there need not be an extra element in addition to WAW  in any of the
>WAYYIQTOLs with stable roots.

        So the stress makes a difference, semantically speaking? If this
is, indeed the case, then the morpheme <AY> would be the stress. (But I
feel more comfortable with the explanantion of Dave Washburn that the
stress is not phonematic in the case of <wayyiqtol>.)



>
>Let us look at the situation from another angle. If the definite article
>was a part of WAYYIQTOL, that would corroborate with the fact that a patah
>can signal the article and that gemination follows the article. However,
>does the gemination of nouns preceded by the article have any semantic
>meaning? Who will say that? It seems that this gemination only is
>phonetically conditioned, and the same is true with the gemination after
>the particle MH. So if I claim that the gemination of WAYYIQTOL can be
>phonetically conditioned as well, this is not without examples. I suspect
>that nobody would have looked for a semantic meaning in the gemination of
>the WAYYIQTOLs if the *use* of this form was not so different from the use
>of YIQTOL and WEYIQTOL. So the suggestion seems to be based on the
>*understanding* of the form rather than on any phonetic or linguistic
>evidence. (We should also keep in mind that the article probably is a
>rather young phenomenon which would also make WAYYIQTOL an even younger
>phenomenon.)
>
>But what is the basis of the supposed difference in stress in the
>Synagogues of Masoretic times. The more I work on the mapping of all the
>finite verbs of the Bible, the more evident it becomes to me that there is
>a very neat pattern in the use of the different forms and constructions.
>For the most part we cannot explain *why* a particular form/construction is
>used (e.g. QATAL-sentence-initial in direct speech, scarce in other genres;
>WEQATAL with imperative force following an imperative; WEYIQTOL with
>volitional and final meaning after imnperatives etc). All we can say is
>that there are different patterns that help us understand the text.
>Following the same line, it would not be unreasonable when two forms with
>similar morhology but different use are found, to stress them differently.
>Particularly when the text for the most part was read aloud, this would be
>a help for the listeners. The penultimate stress of the WAYYIQTOLs would
>from this point of view fit the more staccato narrative recitation, while
>the normal ultimate stress would fit direct speech, future/modality better.
>Just as pausal stress has no phonemic meaning, so the penultimate stress of
>the WAYYIQTOLs need not have any phonmic meaning. The ultimate stress of
>some WEQATALs could be explained the same way.
>
>
>My suggestion, therefore, is very simple. In the unpointed texts (and in
>the reading of them) before the Masoretes, there was no difference in the
>stress of finite verbs with proclitic WAW. In our Christian era when Hebrew
>gradually lost its position as a living spoken language and only few people
>spoke it - in a world dominated by Aramaic and Arabic - to help those
>listening to the recitation of the Hebrew text in the Synagogue, the stress
>pattern we know was introduced. There was no grammatical reason for this,
>only the intention to help the listeners to understand the text better. The
>Masoretes followed this stress pattern with the consequences we know - also
>without any grammatical intentions. However, when the need for a
>systematization of Hebrew grammar arose from the 9th century onward, the
>first Hebrew grammarians with a background in Arabic, Aramaic, Mishnaic
>Hebrew and other languages, saw the need to squeese Hebrew into a model of
>*tense*, and on this basis they interpreted this "stress" difference as
>semantic, and the four-component model for verbs was borne. What earlier
>only had been a help for listeners, now became a semantic distinction in
>the verbal system.
>
>It is quite ironic that the four parts of the model originally was
>distinguished on the basis of *tense*. Later, in the days of S.R. Driver,
>when tense was discarded and aspect was introduced, this was not made on
>the basis of a new study of the verbs of the Bible, but the old basis was
>used. That is, the four groups that was singled out on the basis of tense,
>was still accepted, but now as an expression of aspect. And this is even
>more strange when we realize that there is no one-to-one relationship
>between tense and aspect. By way of conclusion I will say that when it is
>possible to explain WAYYIQTOLs as YIQTOLs being used similarly with YIQTOLs
>in Biblical Aramaic, there is no need to postulate and extra semantic
>element in the gemination/compensatory lengthening of the WAYYIQTOLs
>
>
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>
>
>Regards
>
>Rolf
>
>
>
>Rolf Furuli
>University of Oslo
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