Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Dr Dale M Wheeler <dalemw AT multnomah.edu>]

First of all, thanks Peter for the info.

Secondly, yes I was referring to Van der Merwe's Grammar.  They base their 
decision to opt for SVO on the work of Walter Gross (inter alia: Die 
Satzteilfolge im althebräischen Verbalsatz: Untersucht an den Bücher Dtn. 
Ri und 2Kön, 1996).

Thirdly, to the heart of the matter...

A couple of things trouble me, based on doing some very quick Gramcord 
research on this.

1. Gross, et.al., rely heavily on the supposition that the Waw in front 
(fronting, or choose your own preferred linguistic philosophy term) of 
Waw-Consecutives and Waw Conversive (fill in your own terminology) are 
"fronting" the verbs, thus shoving them into the second slot, which they 
deem to be their natural position anyway.

2. Their second supposition is that since Hebrew doesn't need a separate 
personal pronoun subject, the Verb ends up becoming the first element 
(constituent, choose your own linguistic term) in the sentence, but in a 
Hebrew mind the personal pronoun is actually there, and so the subject is 
still conceptually first, and the verb second.

3.a. Now what troubles me are the assumptions involved in these two 
criteria, esp., as they relate to how a Hebrew speaker actually would view 
the syntax of his own native language.  I'm not so sure that a Hebrew 
speaker would "feel" like the Waw prefixed to a Perfect, Imperfect, etc., 
is actually occupying a separate slot, fronting the verb.  Hebrew has a 
habit of putting all kinds of things first in sentence which may or may not 
be messing with the word order, eg., the Interrogative Particle, the 
Negative Adverbs.  And their habit of combining words into one "word" seems 
to me to more than just "contraction" (eg., I'm, can't, won't, 
etc.).  Thus, I'm not convinced that a universal linguistic theory about 
sentence structure can be applied to Hebrew in this way.  Moreover, isn't 
it pretty much accepted linguistic theory that conjunctions connect 
clauses/sentences, and thus should not be considered as occupying a slot at 
the beginning of a sentence or clause anyway?

3.b. And I seriously question whether a language without the need for 
pronouns, nevertheless reserves a phantom slot for them.  This *certainly* 
is not true for Koine Greek!  But if the prefixed Waw is occupying a "slot" 
and the pronoun is occupying the second "phantom" slot, doesn't that mean 
that the verb is normally in the *third* slot??

4.  Even though I have not seen Gross' work first hand (and van der Merwe's 
doesn't include any actual data), I suspect that part of Gross' and van der 
Merwe's questioning of the normal VSO word order for Hebrew is based on the 
following type of statistics:

The Unprefixed Perfect and Imperfect occur @7000x.
   @25x the Personal Pronoun Subject immediately follows the unprefixed 
Perfect or Imperfect verb.
   @890x the Personal Pronoun Subject immediately precedes the unprefixed 
Perfect or Imperfect verb.

The Waw Prefixed Perfect, Imperfect, and Consecutive forms occur @12,100x.
   @60x the Personal Pronoun Subject of the verb immediately follows it.
    Since there is no "slot" room between the Waw and the Verb, the 
Personal Pronoun Subject never precedes the verb.

5.a. But, the situation is a bit different when a Noun subject is involved:

    64x the Noun Subject is the initial word in verse and precedes the 
Impf or Perf Verb, with no preceding conjunction or preposition attached to 
the Noun Subject.

    111x the Noun Subject FOLLOWS immediately after Impf or Perf verb, 
which is the initial word in the sentence and has no Waw Prefixed:

5.b.  It should also be noted that Ps 77:18; Isa 14:11; Lam 1:15 has order: 
V-O-S, and that 16x (Deut 4:33; Job  4:2; Job  6:5; Job  8:11; Job  36:19; 
Job  39:9; Job  40:28; Prov 6:27; Isai 49:15; Jere 2:11; Jere 2:32; Jere 
15:12; Ezek 22:14; Amos 3:4; 5; Mala 3:8) the Interrogative Particle is 
prefixed to the verb (these are not listed in the 111x).

5.c. It should further be noted that there are about 90 examples where the 
Noun Object or Adverbial Accusative, with or without a prepositional or 
)ET- prefix, or the Subject, preceded by )ET-, a conjunction, negative 
adverb, etc., precede the verb.

6. The problem is further exacerbated by the fact that we are slicing into 
the history of a language which is moving from an inflectional language to 
a distributional language, and that transition seems certain to be moving 
Hebrew from a more flexible word order language to a more rigid word order 
language.

Thots...???


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Dale M. Wheeler, Ph.D.
Research Prof., Biblical Languages    Multnomah Bible College
8435 NE Glisan Street                      Portland, OR  97220
V: 503-251-6416    F:503-251-6478     E: dalemw AT multnomah.edu
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