Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Trevor Peterson <06PETERSON AT cua.edu>]

>===== Original Message From "Karl Randolph" <kwrandolph AT email.com> =====
>To All:
>
>When I took the introductory class to Biblical Hebrew, I was taught that
there are seven inflexions to Hebrew verbs: Qal, Niphal, Piel, Pual, Hiphil,
Hophal, Hithpael, and that all verbs exhibited these forms.
>

Then you were misinformed. First, a root is not a verb. A Semitic verb
consists of root and stem/binyan. Second, the binyanim should not be referred
to as "inflexions." A root in a given binyan constitutes a word, or a lexeme,
and inflection happens to that word. Third, few if any Hebrew roots appear in
all possible binyanim. A few minutes skimming through a lexicon should confirm
this fact. (Fourth, and on a somewhat different track, there is also a Qal
Passive binyan, although arguably if you're learning Masoretic Hebrew there is
not. The same might also be said for other t-binyanim that have been largely
absorbed into Hitpael.)

>Is the Piel a true, independent form? Or is it just a different conjugation
of the Qal, in the same way as there are different conjugations in Spanish for
-a and -o verbs?
>

Not knowing Spanish, I can only comment generally on this suggestion. From a
formal standpoint, the Piel (like all the other binyanim) is simply a way of
constructing a verb from a root. On the semantic side of things, each binyan
has a generally definable relationship to the nature of the verb so
constructed. In some cases, it is hard to distinguish between the meaning of a
given Qal verb and its Piel counterpart, but some broad conclusions can be
drawn by looking at the whole picture. It does happen in some languages that
binyanim will lose their significance. Instead of having a given root that
appears in binyanim X and Y with different meanings, You simply have patterns
X and Y that appear with different roots (which is I think what you're
suggesting). This is pretty much the state of things in Ge'ez. If I remember
correctly, post-biblical Hebrew tends to move in this direction, with a lot of
Qal verbs being altogether replaced by Piel verbs. But in the biblical
material, the system is still significant.

>When reading a pointed Tanakh, I noticed that if a verb is pointed as a Qal,
it almost never has a Piel expression, or if Piel almost never Qal. When
reading an unpointed text, it is usually impossible to recognize any
difference between the two
>(except in the case of participles and possibly infinitives which introduce
other questions). Hence my question above.
>
I think this is a gross overstatement. While it is true that many (perhaps
most) roots are only expressed in a few of the available binyanim (which goes
to show that what you learned in basic grammar was false), and that you will
often encounter roots that appear in Qal or Piel exclusively, there are plenty
of examples that exhibit both forms. The fact that forms are graphically
indistinguishable in a writing system that does not show consonantal
lengthening or most vowels should not be taken as indicative of whether or not
the forms exist. You say yourself that there are some forms where the
distinction can be observed, and we also have to ask whether the Masoretes
made up the distinction out of thin air. Furthermore, the Piel is exhibited
(to varying degrees, depending on how much the writing system can tell us) in
just about every Semitic language--in some cases, clearly distinguishable in
the native writing system. (Akkadian comes to mind here, where consonant
lengthening can be shown, and where enough of the voweling is visible to
distinguish binyanim.) Even Ge'ez (which is also written with vowels
indicated) does not lose binyanim; they simply become insignificant and remain
as vestiges in the forms of verbs. Again, it's conceivable that this could
happen in a language like Hebrew, but the usage patterns and the appearance of
Qal and Piel verbs derived from the same root strongly suggest otherwise.

>I also can’t tell any difference in meaning between Qal and Piel.

Perhaps you're not looking hard enough, if already think that they are
nonexistent or meaningless. A lot of work has been done on the force of the
Piel, and I won't rehash it all here.
>
>The Pual occures more often, but is that the Qal passive mentioned by George
Athas recently?
>
No. The Qal passive apparently was unknown to the Masoretes. (Aside from the
participle, and if we're talking about Hebrew rather than Aramaic.) Jouon
thinks that it happened to have an identical form with the Pual in the perfect
and the Hofal in the imperfect, but I think it's more common to think that the
form was so completely lost by the time of the Masoretes that they read Qal
passives as the most logical equivalent with the same consonants. The Qal
(Peal, actually) passive in Aramaic can be observed to diminish in usage over
time. For that matter, the other internal passive forms (Pual, Hofal) also
fade away, so that by the time we get to the Targums of Onqelos and Jonathan,
the passives are formed pretty much exclusively through the use of t-binyanim.
In Hebrew, a similar progression is posited, and the Qal passive forms are
identified on the basis of distribution. A Qal passive should correspond to a
Qal, a Pual should correspond to a Piel, a Hofal should correspond to a Hifil.
So wherever we find an internal passive form in the MT that corresponds to a
Qal active form but has the same consonants and is pointed as another form, we
suspect an original Qal passive. I think students sometimes get the impression
that there are only a handful of Qal passives here and there in the biblical
text, but compared with other internal passives, they are really not all that
uncommon.

Trevor Peterson
CUA/Semitics