Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Yitzhak Sapir <yitzhaksapir AT gmail.com>]

Karl Randolph wrote:

> The "intensive" has always been too vague to satisfy me. Further, 
> Aramaic  seems not to have it (I speak as one with just surface 
> familiarity with Aramaic, not as an expert). Others have said that it
> is a marker for the "stative" concept.

Aramaic has Pa((el, corresponding to Pi((el.  See Dan 4:11 "ubaddaru"

I think you confused the stative pa(el, with the pi(el.
pi(el has a hiriq and dagesh. in the (ayin  pa(el has a patah and no
dagesh.  An example: hu $amen (he is fat), Modern Hebrew also
has a pi((el for this root: hu $immen (he oiled)  I think the stative is 
always related to the qal.

> As a lexicographer, I have found that pattern to fit the use in 
> Hebrew quite well. However, working from an unpointed text, it is 
> often impossible to recognize the difference between the Qal, Piel,
> Pual and sometimes even the Niphal except from the context. 

I think it might be worthwhile for you to get acquainted with the
consonantal texts of the DSS and the Samaritan Pentateuch.
These have additional consonantal methods for elaborating vowels.  
So even if you think the Tiberian pointing is "invented", you will have 
additional grammatical information dated to the last centuries BCE
that would be useful for differentiating the forms.

> The above pattern has neither the place nor the need for a "shafel"
> form.

What would you make of the Polel and Hitpolel forms?  (consider
verbs: Romem and Hitromem, from the root rwm).  In my opinion,
because of its evolution, Shafel is an alternative for Hiphil.  In any
case, languages develop naturally.  They aren't designed by
language architects so that they have a clear set amount of forms
that can't be broken.  There will be irregular forms of all sorts.

> From: "Dave Washburn"
>
> Since we didn't really know of anything to fill in the question mark, 
> early grammarians didn't think to examine the odd form of 
> Hi$TFXAWeH in that light until Ugaritic came around.  Some 
> comparison with it and some other Semitic languages showed 
> that what we have here is the missing form in the matrix,
> even though it is preserved in only one word in our rather limited 
> corpus of writings.  

Can you point to references on this?  How does this compare with
Akkadian, where (according to Rabin's Semitics book again), you
have four verb forms G (qal), D (piel), $ (hiphil), and N (niphal), each 
of which can theoretically be extended with infixes -ta- and -tan-.

Yitzhak Sapir