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  • From: "Karl M. Bunday" <kmbunday AT ms29.hinet.net>
  • To: "Ruthy & Baruch" <alster AT comandcom.com>, "Biblical Hebrew" <b-hebrew AT franklin.oit.unc.edu>
  • Subject: RE: Hebrew verb forms
  • Date: Thu, 17 Feb 2000 17:32:01 +0800


Shalom!

I don't know if you received any other off-list replies to your
question of a month ago on this subject, but I thought I should jump
in now, both on-list and off-list.

You asked,

> Is there a basic article on Hebrew verb forms that shows
> why they cannot be
> tense-oriented, and gives the major possibilities (such as
> those frequently
> suggested on this list) as to what they might actually mean?

For my money, the current most lucid and most thorough discussion of
this issue in the English language is that in the Waltke-O'Connor
grammar (An Introduction to Biblical Hebrew Syntax by Bruce K. Waltke
and M. O'Connor [Winona Lake, Indiana: Eisenbrauns: 1990] [ISBN
0-931464-31-5]). The part of their book that relates most to your
question is chapter 29, "Introduction to the Conjugations," with the
following chapters on particular verb forms also being helpful.

I should explain where I'm "coming from" on this issue. Before I had
the pleasure of taking my first Hebrew class more than twenty years
ago, I had already had the opportunity to study German (the cousin of
English), Russian (a language in which aspect and tense are both
prominent grammatical categories, well marked in verbal conjugation),
Mandarin (a language entirely without tense, but with some marking of
rather different aspect categories from those of Hebrew), and
Cantonese (as Mandarin, with some differences from Mandarin). To me it
is the most natural thing in the world that a language might not have
a grammatical category of tense--by second nature now that I have been
speaking Chinese for almost a quarter of a century. On the other hand,
it is perfectly understandable to me how the medieval Hebrew
grammarians, who were mostly native speakers of Romance languages and
acquainted with Latin, could have supposed that Hebrew has the
category of tense even if it doesn't.

Grammatical description of the Chinese language among native speakers
of that language is similarly messed up by analogies from Latin and
other Indo-European languages, which have been immensely influential
on grammatical description to the detriment of truthful description
for centuries. The Chinese language, besides lacking a category of
tense, also lacks a category of voice (active versus passive), so that
it presents a very different system indeed from the Indo-European
languages or from the Semitic languages. But in Bible translation into
Chinese and in other translation of languages with voice into Chinese,
there has been established the practice of using the Chinese ADVERSIVE
construction to indicate passive voice. This does much violence to the
meaning of many Bible passages and is one reason why I think I will
have to write a textbook of Biblical Hebrew for Chinese speakers
someday. (I hope I can get some help from some native speakers of
Chinese who are sensitive to this issue along the way.)

To say that a langauge has no category of tense is not, of course, to
say that the language has no means by which to express when an event
happened. In fact, although Chinese never marks tense, Chinese
speakers are ordinarily quite clear about whether happened yesterday
or will happen tomorrow. (The words for "yesterday" and "tomorrow" are
always available to disambiguate doubtful sentences!) I would agree
that there are particular usages in Biblical Hebrew that a translator
into English would

1) usually translate into an expression such as "will X" indicating
future tense, or

2) usually translate as "Xed" indicating simple past tense,

and perhaps other rather consistent examples, but the core of the
Hebrew verbal system IN THE BIBLE, as I have observed it, is aspect
rather than tense. Modern Hebrew's verbal system differs from the
Biblical verbal system perhaps most noticeably in this regard. Modern
Hebrew clearly has a European-style tense system.

Does this help? You doubtless know more Hebrew than I, but perhaps
have not encountered many languages before without marked tense.
That's what helped unstick my thinking on this subject.

Karl M. Bunday "pray for us" 2 Thessalonians 3:1
P.O. Box 674, Panchiao 220, TAIWAN
http://learninfreedom.org





  • RE: Hebrew verb forms, Karl M. Bunday, 02/17/2000

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