Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Dave Washburn <dwashbur AT nyx.net>]

On Tuesday 27 May 2003 15:21, Peter Kirk wrote:
> There seems to be something upside down about your methodology here. If you
> ignore a priori the commonest verb initial constructions, of course you
> will find that less common constructions are basic. And any movement rule
> can work in either direction.

There's "commonest" and then there's "commonest."  The commonest construction 
in the literature of the Hebrew Bible, which deals most commonly with past 
events and prophetic utterances, may or may not be the base form of the 
language in everyday life.  I just picked up a biography of Beethoven for 
some light reading; its most common form is probably going to be the English 
past tense.  If that were the only surviving example of English that we had, 
would you conclude that the past tense was the base form of the English 
language of the 20th century?  We've been down this road before, and the 
upside-down methodology is the one that assumes, a priori, that the form most 
common *within the limited and specialized corpus that has come down to us,* 
is the most fundamental one.  We have to take into account, not only the kind 
of material we have to work with, but also what we know about the general 
structure of language and how we go about discovering base forms in order to 
determine what is derived and why.  Simply counting occurrences gets us 
nowhere.

> What makes you conclude that wayyiqtol and weqatal are "derived"? I accept
> that they are made up of the conjunction and a verb form, but as the
> conjunction is attached to the first word of the great majority of clauses
> in Hebrew this attachment is no reason to exclude them from an analysis.

Are you saying that they are *nothing more* than "the conjunction and a verb 
form"?  If that is the case, how does the addition of the simple conjunction 
so affect the force of the verb form?  Come on, Peter.  It's clear that we 
have distinct forms here, forms with their own distinctive force that amounts 
to much more than just one of the other verb forms plus the simple 
conjunction.  A glance at the grammars, and indeed at the text itself, makes 
it clear that the addition of the W - be it a conjunction or some other sort 
of prefix, as I have argued elsewhere - materially alters the force of the 
verb form in question, and in fact produces a distinct verb form.  I know you 
reject transformational-generative grammar, but the above paragraph is a bit 
much.  

And incidentally, I never said I excluded them from an analysis.  Please 
don't 
monkey with my words this way.

> > On Tuesday 27 May 2003 11:50, Dr Dale M Wheeler wrote:
> > > Does anyone have a response to van der Merwe, et.al.'s contention that
> > > Hebrew is not a VSO language, but rather should be viewed as a SVO
> > > language?
> >
> > I haven't seen van der Merwe's comments, but I agree that Hebrew is at
> > its base SVO.  Virtually all of the comments I've seen in the grammars
> > claiming
> > that it is VSO are based on the wayyiqtol and weqatal, which (ISTM) are
> > clearly derived constructions.  If we look at the non-derived
> > constructions
> > (qatal, yiqtol) the most common order there is SVO, and it is easy to see
> > the
> > VSO order of the waw-consecutive forms being derived by movement.
> >
> > --
> > Dave Washburn
> > http://www.nyx.net/~dwashbur
-- 
Dave Washburn
http://www.nyx.net/~dwashbur