Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Peter Kirk" <peter.r.kirk AT ntlworld.com>]

Dave, I take your point about the limitations of the surviving corpus. But
we do have examples of a wide range of genres, although maybe with an
atypical preponderance of narrative, if, as I suggest, we leave aside poetry
because of special factors involved there. And the feeling I get is that
verb initial clauses are predominant in most if not all of these genres,
certainly not only in narrative. I don't have data to confirm that. Maybe
someone has, which would be of interest.

I am not saying that weqatal and wayyiqtol are nothing more than conjunction
+ verb. I haven't become a follower of Rolf Furuli. But, if for the moment I
accept the rigid distinction you make between syntax and semantics, I would
have to say that at the syntactic level they are a simple combination
(although the second element in wayyiqtol is not regular yiqtol), and that
the change in the force of the verb is something semantic, not syntactic. As
such, on your paradigm, this meaning change must be irrelevant to the
syntactic issue of word order.

I apologise for suggesting that you exclude wayyiqtol and weqatal from your
analysis. I was wrongly attributing to you the method which Heimerdinger
attributes to others including Muraoka. But it is clear that you are basing
your conclusions on other forms and rejecting arguments based on wayyiqtol
and weqatal.

Actually I have a lot of sympathy with Frank's argument that we should not
assume that basic word order is a meaningful concept in every language. If
it cannot be discovered unambiguously perhaps that's because there is no
such thing.

Frank, are you really saying that the basic word order in Sumerian is object
first? I thought that the first such language to be discovered was
Hixkaryana, found by Des Derbyshire in the Amazon jungle in the 1960s.

Peter Kirk
peter.r.kirk AT ntlworld.com
http://web.onetel.net.uk/~peterkirk/
 

> -----Original Message-----
> From: b-hebrew-bounces AT lists.ibiblio.org [mailto:b-hebrew-
> bounces AT lists.ibiblio.org] On Behalf Of Dave Washburn
> Sent: 28 May 2003 00:50
> To: b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org
> Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] VSO vs SVO
> 
> 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
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