Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Rolf Furuli <furuli AT online.no>]

Dear Randall,




>rolf-->The reason why we misunderstand one another and disagree, may, to a
>certain
>>extent, be that we use different terminology.
>...
>>When I speak of "semantic meaning" I have in mind a meaning that is
>>uncancellable.
>
>I understand that and have said that it artificially restricts real
>language.
>
>I don't see us misunderstanding but disagreeing. I understand the "100%
>subjective system(s)" only too well, and they're not new.

Two grammarians who advocate the view about  semantic meaning are H.P.
Grice and M. Broman Olsen. You can disagree, but you can hardly say that it
is not a sound linguistic principle, and it can be falsified. You can just
point to a situation wher RWC ("run"), or $YR ("sing") is non-durative
(punctual). If you cannot do that, you should accept that durativity can be
classified as "semantic meaning" because there are examples where it is
uncancelable.

>
>That is why I wrote the 'mess' of Gn 1, of what biblical Hebrew wasn't.
>Because the ssystem you advocate would predict it and allow it.
>Not only do you have a chorus of ancient witnesses against 'your' system,
>internal consistency against it (I'll take 95% to mean consistent), but it
>would generate bad/wrong/false texts if allowed to operate on its own. I
>think that you need to come to grips with that.

You ignore my argument without discussing it. Do you agree with Comrie that
what
signals the past termination in narratives, where the RT of one verb
follows the other, is not the nature of the verbs, but the nature of the
narrative? Says he,
"However, as was shown in section 1.8, this sequencing of events is a
property of the narrative itself, quite independent of the verb forms used
to encode narrative, so that the mere fact that verb forms receive this
interpretation in narrative is not sufficient evidence for assigning this
meaning to these verb forms." ("Tense", 1985:61)

You do exactly what Comrie says we should not do. You take 95 % (or rather
99 % in narrative) and say that because of the function of these, my model
is wrong. I ask you to demonstrate that the nature of the form WAYYIQTOL is
past or perfective, and that it is not a YIQTOL+conjunction which is used
in narrative, and that it is the narrative that signal past, consecutive
meaning, But you just keep on with your assumption of 95 % consistency.

In order not to be misunderstood, I would like to stress the following:
When I say that WAYYIQTOL,YIQTOL,WEYIQTOL, QATAL, and WEQATAL can be used
for any situation, I do not say there is no difference between them. I
claim there is a semantic difference between the group
WAYYIQTOL,YIQTOL,WEYIQTOL on one hand and QATAL, and WEQATAL on the other.
Inside each group there is a syntactic difference because of proclittic
waw, and the Masoretes has made an extra discourse distinction of their own
(a distinction which is far from being consistent), or they have mimicked
others before them.

In my model, no form codes for tense, so each form can be used for past,
present and future. Because the aspects are subjective viewpoints which do
not say anything definite about whether an event was terminated or not,
both aspects can be used for incomplete and completed events. So far, the
choice of aspect is optional, but that does not mean that both aspects
*are* used for all kinds of situations. There are restrictions such as
topic/comment, foreground/background, main clause/dependent clause,
indicative/modal,and these and others are subsumed under the conventions of
the language. It stands to reason that the use or not of the conjunction
waw will be different in the different situations. While there is no
semantic/grammatical/syntactic reason why a series of YIQTOLs could not be
used in narrative, this is not usually done, except in a few accounts. It
was felt natural to have a proclittic waw. In Ugaritic the YAQTUL is used
in narrative, only in a few instances with proclittic waw. And
Middle-Egyption does not have a conjunction "and" at all.


>
>And if you don't accept these witnesses, at least let modern Arabic point
>you in the right direction. Ask an Arab whether 'lam yaktub', all by
>itself, doesn't mean "he did not write" and aspectually/temporally similar
>to kataba?
>

I do not think that modern Arabic can throw any light upon the verbal
system of Classical Hebrew. And I do not trust a system that never has
tried to isolate the meaning of the fundamental units of Hebrew verbs, but
build on assumptions based on the function of verb forms. I accept the
principle of James Barr when he argued against the etymological fallacy,
that what counts, is the synchronic meaning of words and morphosyntactic
forms. I see the value of historical-comparative studies, but most
important is it to study the occurrence of verbs in *the whole corpus* of
classical Hebrew.





Regards

Rolf



Rolf Furuli
University of Oslo