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  • From: furuli AT online.no
  • To: b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] Fw: WAYYIQTOL
  • Date: Thu, 11 Mar 2004 15:59:00 +0100

Dear Peter,

Allow me a few comments regarding the Masoretes.

snip

So, George, just to clarify: are you saying that there are in fact two different verb forms, as clearly seen with 3-He etc roots, but that before the Masoretes these were distinct only in certain verbs? Clearly they were written the same in unpointed texts. Are you saying that they were also pronounced the same, until the Masoretes? If so, that conflicts with the general picture of the Masoretes as careful recorders of what they heard. I wonder why they departed so blatantly from their regular practice on this one.


The Masoretes would not dream of changing a single consonant of the text, and they were extremely careful to follow exactly what they heard recited in the synagogue. Yet they were inventors, not of new grammatical rules or new interpretations, but of vowel points and accents. Their task was to translate what they heard in the synagogue into vowels and accent marks. When we compare with the DSS, we see that by and large they followed a very old system of vowels, i.e. their punctuation represents pronunciation used B.C.E.

As to what today is called WAYYIQTOL, WEYIQTOL and WEQATAL, they carefully followed what they heard in the synagogue as well. Because shewa and patah could be pronounced in a similar, or almost similar way (as an "a" sound), the pronunciation of the first syllable of all three forms could have been the same, or almost the same. But the stress may have been different, because narrative accounts probably would be read in a different way than future and modal accounts. The Masoretes had at their disposition shewa and patah, which were pronounced similarly. And the fact that they chose one of them for verbs which often have past reference and the other for verbs which often have future or modal reference, is no departure from their faithfulness to tradition. This is no more strange than that they introduced hatef-vowels in certain situations. Thus the Masoretes were faithful to the consonant text, and they were faithful to the pronunciation that they heard in the synagogue. But in time, grammarians read into the Masoretic pointing something that was not intended by the Masoretes themselves, and the four-component model was born. So these later grammarians are the real inventors of the new grammatical theories that Hebrew has four conjugations, while the Masoretes were the ones who invented the graphical difference between verbs, which made it logical to distinguish between four, or rather five (WEYIQTOL as well) groups of verbs.

snip




Peter Kirk
peter AT qaya.org (personal)
peterkirk AT qaya.org (work)
http://www.qaya.org/


Best regards

Rolf



Rolf Furuli
University of Oslo




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