Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Peter Kirk" <Peter_Kirk AT sil.org>]

Serge wrote:

I feel the real enigma is how nations who first obtained literacy (and
actually writing systems) at the time when qtl must have long ago replaced
(short) yqtl as THE past tense in their respective speech types, - how did
they manage to  preserve this archaism in their late-born literary
languages?

If this were true, it would indeed be extremely remarkable. Indeed so
remarkable that surely this is very good evidence against your statement
that "qtl must have long ago replaced (short) yqtl as THE past tense in
their respective speech types" and that "BH is no “language”, but rather a
collection of texts whose language has little to do with languages actually
spoken by the texts’ authors". I don't know what evidence you have for
making these two statements as you have simply asserted them and then argued
from them.

I would suggest that these forms were preserved among the Hebrew speaking
people long after they had become obsolete in other Semitic languages. As a
similar example, Russian preserves grammatical categories (e.g. a complex
case system) which are obsolete in most other modern Indo-European
languages, but this does not imply that Russian is not a spoken language!

Perhaps you can explain what strong evidence you have for your assertions,
or at least what sources you are basing them on.

Peter Kirk


-----Original Message-----
From: Serge Lyosov [mailto:lyosovs AT hotmail.com]
Sent: 31 March 2001 19:46
To: Biblical Hebrew
Subject: Re: BH Syntax

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