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  • From: furuli AT online.no
  • To: b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] Fw: WAYYIQTOL
  • Date: Wed, 10 Mar 2004 15:08:14 +0100

Dear Karl,

There are several misunderstandings in your post; see below:


Uri:

snip

The conclusion I draw is that the major
linguistic influences during that period were
Aramaic, followed by Greek and, my knowledge
is thanks to this forum, apparently Latin too.
Hebrew was a fossil language that continued to
be used for official records, religion and
high literature but not fluently spoken except
by a educated elite (though most could
understand at least some of it). Thus the loss
of the WAYYIQTOL form.

There is absolutely no evidence that the Jews forgot their language during the Babylonian captivity. A language is sociologically speaking the essence of national unity, so that Hebrew should be forgotten during three generations in Babylon is simply unbelievable.

Around the beginning of the first millennium C.E. there is evidence that both Hebrew and Aramaic were spoken languages. The question is whether the mother tongue of Jeshua was Hebrew, and whether Aramaic was the language of the educated people, or whether the opposite were true. Geographical location could have played a role as well, as Greek was widespread in some areas, perhaps at the expense of one of the other languages. The evidence of the NT is that Hebrew was the common language (Acts 21:40;22:2; 26:14) in the situations addressed. The Aramaic and Hebrew words in the NT can be taken both ways, either to show that the mother tongue of Jeshua was Aramaic (He used Aramaic sentences), or that his mother tongue was not Aramaic (because his Aramaic words were quoted but not translated, suggesting that they were extraordinary and therefore should be transcribed). The same can be said regarding his use of hebrew words. It is worth noting that Josephus distinguishes between "Hebrew" and "Syriac" (Aramaic), and this lends credence to the view that when the NT says "Hebrew," it means "Hebrew". All the writings in Hebrew made at Qumran and imported to Qumran similarly suggest that Hebrew was a living language in the last centuries B.C.E. and the first century C.E.


Another evidence of fossil use of the language
is the fossilization of spelling during a time
of pronunciation shift. The pronunciations
preserved by the Masorites were not the same
as those spoken even at the end of the Galut
Babel. (Frozen spellings are fairly rare in
living languages, it is only within the last
couple of centuries that it was considered a
mark of an educated man to have consistent
spelling in English. Some languages have
periodic adjustments in their written
languages to reflect shifts in pronunciation.
Even in English the dictatorship of
dictionaries will come to an end.)

As to WAYYIQTOL, there is no evidence for its existence before the 5th century C.E. There is no distinction between WAYYIQTOL and WEYIQTOL (the conjunction WAW+YIQTOL) at Qumran, and there is no distinction between the two in the transcriptions in the second column of Origen's Hexapla. I argue in my coning thesis that there is strong evidence that the Masoretes was the inventors of the distinction between WEYIQTOL and WAYYIQTOL, although the meaning the Masoretes ascribed to WAYYIQTOL was different from the meaning ascribed to it from David Kimhi onward. If this is true, it means that the concept WAYYIQTOL only is a fiction, a misunderstanding based un a wrong interpretation of of Masoretic pointing. Thus the WAYYIQTOL form could not be lost at any given point of time, because it has never existed as an independent semantic unit!


Best regards

Rolf


Rolf Furuli
University of Oslo


My conclusion is that Hebrew was not a
natively spoken language within a few
generations after the Galut Babel.

Karl W. Randolph.

----- Original Message -----
From: Uri Hurwitz <uhurwitz AT yahoo.com>



Karl Randolph <kwrandolph AT email.com> wrote, inter alia:
"....but
the WAYYIQTOL form referred to a functionality
that was unique to Hebrew, ..."

I'm not sure what you mean, Karl. In Arabic the imperfect often serves as the participle, or, what is vulgarly known, the present tense, to this day.This often follows the conjuction of the attached "F" letter, vowelled "fa", one of the Arabic equivalents to the Heb. "W", the other being "wa" familiar to members of this list.
>
> However one would need an Arabist for further elaboration.
>
> Uri
--




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