Biblical Hebrew Forum

[unikom AT paco.net]

Dear Rolf,

You surely know that your suggestion is more than a bit unusual. Could you
support your argument statistically? It basically contradicts my
experience, and although I'm always prepared to change my views when facts
change, there has to be a good evidence.

>Over a period of ten years I have analyzed all the more than 70.000
verbs of the Tanakh, the DSS and the inscriptions as to temporal
reference, modality and different discourse functions. My conclusion,
for which I present more than one thousand examples in my thesis, is
that Classical Hebrew has no tenses but two aspects (with very
different characteristics compared with their English counterparts).
The forms YIQTOL, WAYYIQTOL, and WEYIQTOL all represent the
imperfective aspect and QATAL  and WEQATAL represent the perfective
aspect.  The view of the "reversal of tense" by WE- WAY(Y)  collides
head on with the data material.<


Best regards,

Vadim