Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Peter Kirk <peterkirk AT qaya.org>]

On 29/11/2004 09:46, Rolf Furuli wrote:

> ...
>
> > It would also be interesting to see how well the apocopation of 
> > WEYIQTOLs correlates with a jussive (modal) sense. There is quite a 
> > strong correlation, although far from a perfect one, with all 
> > YIQTOLs, and I would expect WEYIQTOLs to match. 
>
>
>
> Of the 155 apocopated WEYIQTOLs I analyze 42 (27.1 %) as indicative, 
> and 113 (72.9) as modal.  As for the 217 apocopated YIQTOLs I analyze 
> 12 (5.5 %) as indicative.
Thank you, Rolf. But there seems to be something wrong with your totals. 
I found 841 apocopated YIQTOLs and WEYIQTOLs together, but your total is 
only 372. I also found 499 which are marked as "jussive form" (although 
I am not sure why some are "apocopated" but not "jussive form"), and 495 
which are marked as both "apocopated" and "jussive form". So where is 
the big difference?

I tried to reproduce the rest of your data but found 398 YIQTOLs and 
WEYIQTOLs which are apocopated but not marked in the Westminster 
morphological database as having "jussive meaning". (I tend to feel that 
this attempt to mark "jussive meaning" goes beyond what a morphological 
database should do, but in this case it is helpful.) There are 102, all 
apocopated, which are "jussive form" but not "jussive meaning". This is 
a much larger number than your 54 indicative YIQTOLs and WEYIQTOLs. So 
it seems that there are a large number of forms which you consider 
"modal" but Westminster does not consider "jussive". What can these be? 
Do you count simple futures as "modal"?

I started to look at the 295 forms which are marked as apocopated but 
not considered jussive in form or meaning. A large number of these seem 
to be forms of BW) "go", in the qal, which are marked as apocopated but 
do not in fact seem to be apocopated in any way. (Some are missing the 
middle radical vav, but many are not e.g. Gen 32:9.) So it looks like 
there is some misleading marking in the Westminster database. Possibly I 
am not using the latest version, although it comes with some very new 
software.

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