Biblical Hebrew Forum

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

rolf katav, RT>C,
>These statistics are problematic. 

Agreed,
because they don't state whether differentiating veqatalTI from qaTALti. 

Or were those statistics literally qatal, with no veqatal included? 

It would not be useful scholarship to mix those categories into one
statistical base. That is so clear to people who know biblical Hebrew well.
They all distinguish qatalti from veqatalti in classical Hebrew. To mix
them would be like shortcircuiting a battery cell and then announcing that
the remains have serious problems and cannot supply power. 

> with future meaning (less than 10 % of these,
>according to my estimate, represent future perfect).

Exactly. Future reference is rarely 'future perfect' or even 'future
imperfective'. Aspects are regularly secondary in future fields. Which is
partly why Jouon Muraoka purposely mismatched their nomenclature, perfect
for suffix TAM and future for prefix TAM.

bivraxot
Randall Buth, 
Jerusalem