Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Rolf Furuli <furuli AT online.no>]

Dear Randall,


Your answer made several things clear, and I can imagine that your approach
with Biblical Hebrew sentences matched to real situations can be really
beneficial for the students. But I do not know how much Hebrew they are
supposed to learn by this method,in other words, if this method will be
supplied with other methods. I see several advantages with the method and
several drawbacks.

SOME ADVANTAGES,

1) A vocabulary is built rather quickly.
2) Two different senses (ears and eyes) are alerted, thus learning becomes
easier.
3) The energy new students use to come to grips with the "anomalous" verbal
system in the traditional way of teaching is used for better things.
4) Aquaintance with Hebrew verbs comes gradually by induction.

SOME DRAWBACKS

If your method is not used for too long a time, or is, after the elementary
things are learned, supplied with other methods, there may be few
disadvantages.
However, at some point of time you *must* return to traditional methods by
telling the students what is the meaning of the verbal system.

The brain of a child who grows up, probably is programmed to learn
language, as Chomsky has proposed. Apart from this programming the child
starts from scratch. By help of induction it draws conclusions as to the
meanings of sounds and combinations of them. Many such conclusions are
wrong, but they become adjusted as it gets more experience. A student
already has experienced this with his or her own language. Therefore the
student will inevitably view verbs in the light of his/her own language if
the student experience the inductive method you describe. If her mother
tongue lacks aspect, such as does Norwegian, she must be told what aspect
is, because this is impossible to learn by experience when she already has
a mother tongue lacking it. One can of course refuse to make known one's
own views as to the meaning of the verbal conjugations, as van der Merwe et
al. and yourself do, but still you have to teach the possibilities, and
help the students to reach their own conclusion. The basic drawback,
therefore, as I see it, is that students cannot learn the meaning of the
Hebrew verbal system by help of this method alone.

---

You have several times said that I stress the few exceptions while you draw
conclusions on the basis of the bulk of examples. To use wayyiqtol, 5 % of
the examples argue against a past-tense-meaning, 95 % argue in favor of it.
We need, as you rightly argue in connection with the Job Targum, not only
rely on quantity (numbers), but also on quality (discourse/contextual
matters). For instance, if I have the hypothesis that "all swans are
white", an observation of millions of swans will not prove the hypothesis,
but one or two black swans (who are born black) will falsify the
hypothesis. Language is not that clearcut, but it illustrates that not
quantity, but quality is important.


 I argue that what makes the past reference in narratives is not the verb
but the narrative itself (as Comrie also has argued). It is a contradiction
of terms to claim that if WAYYIQTOL is not a past tense, this must be shown
in narrative. It is impossible to show that in mainline narrative, because
of the nature of the narrative. Thus, if we consider all the poetic and
prophetic books, where the true nature of WAYYIQTOL can be expected to be
seen, we find that 22 % of the WAYYIQTOLs are non-past. If we go a step
further and exclude the narrative sections of these books, the percentage
of non-past WAYYIQTOLs will be between 30 and 40 %, and that is significant
(provided that a quality test speaks for their true non-past function).

I have no problems with accepting exceptions, not even as much as 5 %.
However, I demand that these exceptions are given a qualitative
investigation, in order to give some kind of logical explanation for their
existence.

Do you agree that because of the nature of  narratives it is impossible to
pinpoint tense and aspects of the verbs that are used (except in special
instances)? Objectively speaking the actions of a narrative account are
terminated, and reference time of the second follows that of the first and
so forth. If we *assume* that only verbs which signal past tense/and or the
perfective aspect can be used to describe terminated situations in the
past, then the WAYYIQTOLs must either signal past tense, the perfective
aspect or both. But in that case it is our *assumption* that serves as
proof and not the verbs of the narrative. If we start with no assumption of
what kind of verb that can be used in mainline narrative, we cannot draw
any conclusion at all about the nature of the WAYYIQTOLs in the Bible, even
though most of them occur in narratives and describe terminated actions in
the past.


To illustrate: We cannot from the fact that narrative IPRUS  or IPARRAS
forms in Accadian describe past, terminated actions know whether the forms
are tenses or aspects or even modals. We cannot from the fact that the
YAQTUL form is extensively used in the narratives of Ugaritic know whether
the form in this context is preterite but in other contexts modal. And
further, we cannot from the widespread use of YIQTOL and the participle for
past, terminated actions in Aramaic know the temporal or aspectual nature
of the forms. And further, we cannot know the aspectual and temporal
(tense) nature of the WAYYIQTOLs.


Because narrative accounts are wo widespread in the Bible, and because
their very resticted nature prevents us from knowing the true nature of the
verb forms used, we need another approach than what is common. I suggest
the following very simple approach:

ASSUMPTION: The fundamental linguistic units of a language have the same
semantic meaning in all contexts.

TEST: Find the fundamental linguistic units of Biblical Hebrew
(participles, infinitives, prefix-form(s), and suffix-form(s), and test all
the occurrences of each form in the light of event time, reference time,
deictic point (to investigate tense), and in the light of whether the
events they describes *objectively* were terminated or not (to investigate
aspect)at RT. Diachronic questions must of course be considered, but so
far, I have not found any evidence that the basic meaning of any
fundamental linguistic unit has changed from the first to the last book of
the Bible.

EVALUATION: Even though the possibilities of mainline narrative are very
restricted, in some contexts will the nature of their aspect be visible. I
have earlier given examples of conative WAYYIQTOLs, which must be
imperfective. An example of how a context definitely gives an imperfective
interpretation is 1 Kings 6:1 where BNH definitely is ingressive - he
started to build. Genesis 2:21 is the first passage on my list of actions
happening while a certain situation held ("while he slept, God took...
closed up...formed" - analogous with "while he was sitting in his chair,
Peter entered the room.") To show the imperfectivity of WAYYIQTOLs in
narratives, there must be special contexts, and these are naturally few.

Much better is it to work with non-narrative matrial, but a sound statistic
must cover *all* examples. I have found that there is no praticular tense
pattern in either of the groups YIQTOL, WAYYIQTOL, QATAL, and WEQATAL. But
a reasonable number of each form have RT (reference time) before, parallel
with, and after C (the deictic point). Only one conclusion is possible:
*tense* is absent from Biblical Hebrew (no verb form is a grammaticalized
tense). I have also found that no form codes for aspect (in the English
sense of the word, where the perfective aspect always includes the end and
the imperfective aspect does not). Only one conclusion is possible: Asepct
(in the English sense) is not grammticalized in Hebrew. However, I have
found that Hebrew verbs can be classified in two groups (YIQTOL,WAYYIQTOL,
and WEYIQTOL in one, and QATAL  and WEQATAL in the other), each groups
having definite characteristics of each of the aspects. The YIQTOL  group
has imperfective characteristics and the QATAL  group has perfective
characteristics. Thus both the imperfective and the perfective aspects are
grammaticalized in Hebrew, though being slightly different from their
English counterparts. I will further argue that the waws in WAYYIQTOL,
WEYIQTOL  and WEQATAL only serve a syntactic function, thus being pragmatic
but not semantic.




Regards

Rolf



Rolf Furuli
University of Oslo














>Didn't I say "NOT modern" loud enough?
>You are talking about modern, not I.
>
>>but I will strongly dispute your model of learning
>>biblical Hebrew through modern Hebrew "the natural way".
>
>I was talking about biblical Hebrew.
>Did I mention that biblical means biblical, not modern? NO?
>Tov. sfat Kena`an, sfat bereshit, sfat yeshayahu.
>
>...
>(teacher to student:) bo, qaH et ha-kos veshafaxtA et ha-mayim.
>(to the others after obedient compliance:)
>ha-ish ba el ha-shulHan vayyiqaH et ha-kos vayyishpox et ha-mayim `al
>ha-qarqa`.
>...
>Biblical Hebrew sentences matched to real situations. Not modern Hebrew.
>Asking students to pour water and describing to students what they did.
>The nice thing about inductive introductions is that there is no
>terminology to use.
>
>No one else is currently doing this because of an interesting 'catch 22'.
>The people that need it most are afraid of it or incapable of it, as though
>thinking in English or other lo`azit will help them. The people best
>capable of doing this, the very few who speak modern Hebrew AND have
>immersed themselves in Biblical literature, arn't interested for three
>reasons. They know the biblical language is full of holes that need to be
>filled in according to the history of the language. They certainly don't
>want to invent something different/new for those holes. Serious students
>will learn the whole language anyway.
>
>... Which is what I recommend, paradoxically. One year students should
>start with an efficient BIBLICAL hebrew course, taught with as much living
>Biblical Hebrew as the teacher is capable of.
>Long term Biblical students are best served becoming fluent in modern
>dialect and immersing themselves in the primary Biblical literature. This
>last is the recommendation at Hebrew U.
>
>The nice thing about running immersion modules of biblical Hebrew is the
>rediscovery of what little kids would have heard around the campfire and in
>daily conversations in their absorption of the material.
>
>The same process happens in old Greek, too. The best way to become aware of
>Greek aspect is to need to give a few hundred commands to students in a
>class where most of them require 'aorist' imperatives -- and then comes the
>realization that one's whole life has been spent in orientation around
>'present' stems because of modern dictionary practice. Well, that gets
>undone by being forced to do the right thing. It is quite a wake-up call to
>a teacher.
>
>yisge shlamxon,
>Randall Buth