Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Henry Churchyard" <churchh AT crossmyt.com>]

>>> Hebrew word order is (usually) V-S-O. Verb, subject, object.
>>> Greek word order is (usually) S-O-V, Subject, object, verb.

>> From: Dave Washburn [mailto:dwashbur AT nyx.net]
>> Sent: Tue, November 13, 2001 2:21 PM

>> Well, maybe and maybe not, particularly for Hebrew.  The main
>> reason that it is often asserted that Hebrew order is VSO is
>> because of the predominance of the wayyiqtol form in the Bible.
>> This does not mean, however, that VSO was the "normal" word order
>> in conversational classical hebrew was VSO, merely that in
>> narrative prose that's the order we have preserved most often.  My
>> own view is that the wayyiqtol is the result of a transformation
>> that moves the verb to first position from a "base" SVO order.  But
>> that's just my view.

> From: "Lisbeth S. Fried" <lizfried AT umich.edu>

> I took a couple of classes in my graduate student days in
> linguistics at UM with a fellow who studied at MIT with Chomsky and
> indeed was a Chomsky clone.  He was of the opinion, and taught, that
> every language was at its base SVO.  He had a slew of proofs.  I
> wrote a paper taking each one of the proofs of SVO and showed that
> biblical Hebrew was VSO at its core.  (Someone else showed it for
> Welsh.)

I didn't get too far into syntax, but I know that some theories
have problems with a fundamental or "deep" VSO word order,
because V-O is usually considered to be a constituent, while
V-S and S-O aren't usually considered to be hierarchical
constituents.

--
Henry Churchyard   churchh AT crossmyt.com   http://www.crossmyt.com/hc/