Biblical Hebrew Forum

[yochanan bitan-buth <ButhFam AT compuserve.com>]

Yosef katav:

>I was under the impression that wayyiqtol corresponds semantically to the 
>perfect. But, there is a syntactic and grammatical difference? I saw a 
>footnote that said "For a hypothesis on how the wc. + impf. came to have a

>meaning similar to that of the perfect, cf. Buth 1992: 104."
>Is that you? Could you explain, it seems to contradict your view of number

>5.
>
>5. Wayyiqtol represents a situation subjectively as Perfective. To which 
>you said it was misrepresentative. What do you mean?
>
 
Well, for starters, the quoted statement mixes apples and oranges. 
"impf" [i.e. imperfect-RB] in the statement apparently refers to a form,
the short prefix tense, and not its basic aspectual reference which is
"perfective". Yet it uses a semantic 'name', 'imperfect'.   And 'perfect'
in the statement apparently refers to a form, the suffix tense, yet
the name is 'semantic'. The terminology of the footnote comes from van der
Merwe, 
where he has purposely chosen the terms because they are so widely
[mis-]used by beginning Hebrew students, not because they are helpful.
(Christo and I are in basic agreement that the Hebrew verb is not clearly a
tense or an aspect or a mood.) I attribute alot of the confusion of the
Hebrew verb to such mistaken terminology being internalized and treated as
either 'real' or 'surreal' by beginning students. 
Secondly, wayyiqtol does not simply present a situation as 'perfective'.
There are examples, especially with 'movement' verbs, where a situation is
better described as presented as 'past' rather than 'perfective'. (Gn 37.27
and Ruth 1.6 are the two examples that I continually quote for students,
though examples are sprinkled throughout the Hebrew bible. Rolf could
probably provide a nice list, and pending that, one could collect LXX
imperfects as a starting point.) 
Thirdly, I also find the implications of 'subjective' misleading. Again,
while "pure aspect" is subjective, the 97% overlap with past time is more
than a subjective accident. 

>I don't have access to "The Hebrew Verb in Current Discussions", Journal
of 
>Translation and Text-linguistics 5:91-105. If that is your article, do you

>have a copy that can be emailed to me?

I'll send an e-copy offlist, though without the journal pagination.

>Rolf responded:
>
>"I would say that WAYYIQTOL is *imperfective* just as YIQTOL and 
>represents
>the subjective imperfective view of the reporter."

I truly admire Rolf's industry on this question. BUT, YET, HOWEVER . . .
This is a very good example of how a small point can turn a system around
on itself. It is also a good example of how researchers are able to
inadvertantly hide themselves from reality by declaring a language so dead
that it can be subjectively manipulated by the researcher. 
Thus, someone may innocently say, 
"Who can say that the ancient Hebrew speaker didn't "think" of vayyiqtol as
imperfective. Logic cannot dictate whatever story style ancient Hebrew did
or did not have." True, theorectically. 

Well, the LXX already in the early 3rd century BCE translated vayyiqtol
with augmented aorist indicative (=Greek perfective/whole-past,  and cannot
be equated with the Greek imperfective, whether augmented imperfect [past
open-ended] or present). The LXX didn't do that 100% of the time, but close
enough to get the idea. 

And Greek is an 'aspect' language, par excellance!! Aspect plays a much
stronger and more definite role in Greek than in Hebrew or Aramaic. Notice
how Hebrew "ten" 'give!' must be translated either by 'dos!' '(simple)
give!' or 'didou!' '(open-ended) be giving!'

The Aramaic targums, likewise, regularly use the "suffix tense" for the
vayyiqtol. Thus, vayyomer is va'amar in Aramaic.

Here, you have two major, ancient, cultural votes against the
'imperfective' theory by bilinguals from a time period when the literary
Hebrew language was still living and being used. (NB: Qumran still used the
vayyiqtol literary language and wrote AFTER the LXX and also have a
'contemporary' copy of an Aramaic Job, though I date the general targum
phenomena to post-70 CE. ) The "imperfective" counter-proposal is all based
on making marginal examples/questions into the system itself. (And 'fudging
the data', see below.) 

There is even a modern confirmation because written Arabic still uses the
"lam yaktub" form for the simple negative past. They don't know 'why?' the
jussive form is used with this negative for a past meaning. It just is.
They learn it, use it, internalize it and 'map it to referential
situations', but they don't get to know its history unless they study
comparative Semitics. (NB: the Hebrew vayyiqtol is also noted for generally
following the jussive prefix form rather than the 'regular' prefix form.
Quite a surprising "accident".)

Anyway, Hebrew was an underdifferentiated language for relating to
referential worlds, which means that the researcher should expect a
relatively high proportion of 'fuzzy', 'marginal' examples. That, of
course, is what we get. What we cannot do, though, is try to reinterpret
marginal examples through a non-historical, non-Hebrew lens, in which
vayyiqtol is an imperfective. That isn't playing the same game or dealing
with the same language. 

The above give historical reasons besides that 'fact' of the Massoretic
vocalization. The MT, by the way, is 'pre-grammatical' and preserves many
forms that went against their common sense or against medieval  grammarians
yet are shown to be true by comparative Semitics [e.g. qal passives,
hishtaf`al binyan, Hifta`al binyan]. The MT passes on a tradition and does
not invent one. 

Finally, I would claim that the above is reconstructible by USING Biblical
Hebrew. That is, using/hearing enough vayyiqtols in correct contexts and
everyday contexts so colors the form that it gets psychologically mapped to
the meaning as a 97% implicature by language learners and children. And
vayyiqtol ends up in CONTRAST to normal narrative yiqtol for repetitive
past, yet it is in complemenatry distribution with qatal and narrative
yiqtol is in complementary distribution with veqatalTI. 
I believe that most of the problems with 'understanding' the biblical
Hebrew verb, arise from not having had to LIVE with it. Describing it, of
course, is a different matter. Linguistics hasn't finished with English and
I see no better hope for Hebrew. Fjortunately, I can use and understand a
language without knowing the ultimate, best description of a language. 

Sorry for the length of this email. In a word I had said,
...'misrepresentative' ...

yisge shlamax,
Randall Buth