Biblical Hebrew Forum

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

shalom Rolf, a couple more quick notes:

You are misinterpreting Comrie:
>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)

Comrie is not excluding all/any narrative forms from contributing to the
marking of past or sequentiality, notice the word 'mere' and 'not
sufficient'. the mere existence of a form in a narrative does not prove
anything. Very true. What matters is how it patterns and how it helps to
create 'narrative context'. Hebrew verbs do that, see below.

>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.

You're dealing with specific lexical items here. Yet even here you will
find that things are not absolute. For example, a word like lir`ot can be
'intransitive' of an animal grazing and 'transitive' of a shepherd
directing the animals to eat. Back to words like 'sing', they can be
'unitized' and repeated. 'He sang a song for three minutes' (durative) He
sang that song ten times (unitized and repeated though viewed as a whole).
He used to sing the song over and over. (unitized and repeated but not
viewed as a whole) 1 Sam 16.23 uses lenagen 'to play music' in this last
sense, "David used to take the stringed instrument in his hand and would
play ..." This is unitized and repeated. One classic kind of imperfective.
No big deal. 

>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.

Exactly my point about your system. It mis-predicts. For example, within a
narrative framework (not a separate quoted speech within a narrative) the
past iterative/habitual suddenly becomes a much higher percentage of
narrative yiqtols. "just an accident, not semantic, you would say." That is
one kind of mis-prediction. On the other hand, a short discourse, quoted
speech, say four or five clauses of only yiqtol=is non-past/future and not
any kind of narrative. In both cases it is the verb form that is doing the
signalling, making the primary implicatures. E.g. within past narrative the
yashqu in Gn 29.2 is marking the past-habitual status, as is the
vene'esfu...vegalelu ... vehishqu ...veheshivu. (Targum Onkelos correctly
uses the participle for all those verbs, both yashqu and vehishqu, as
expected of good middle Aramaic.) I like being able to predict over 95%,
because even the other 5% becomes more communicative in its lesser
predictability.

>I do not think that modern Arabic can throw any light upon the verbal
>system of Classical Hebrew. 

It throws light on Rolf Furuli's assumptions. It falsifies them. It exactly
shows the etymological fallacy in assuming only one absolute 'meaning' for
a category. Because all languages have always been changing. So ask an Arab
about "lam yaktub". Accept its synchronic reality. A prefix
perfective/simple-past that doesn't fit or get predicted by the rest of the
Arabic system, but it's real.

aTyaab tiHiyaati (Arab: 'my best regards')

Randall Buth

Ps: I am going to run out of much more time this week. I begin to teach the
intensive Biblical Hebrew ulpan next week. During the first week (20 class
hours) students will learn 200-300 words in 1000 forms, all BIBLICAL. Yes,
even some vav hahippux forms. That is the way to begin a language. They
will, of course, be learning to expect the language to do more than they
imagine and to surprise them at one turn after another. They will learn to
relate the situations to directly to Hebrew, no matter how they latter want
to classify or describe this. (Mother tongues of this group of students
includes English, Russian, and a westAfrican.) Those that would like to
experience a bit of what this is like can purchase "Living biblical Hebrew
for Everyone, vol. " at buth.jerusalemschool.org ($79 mailed from US) or
directly from me in Jerusalem ($65).