Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Vadim Cherny" <VadimCherny AT mail.ru>]

> >>"I will be" is modern Hebrew. But it has long been known that in
> >>biblical Hebrew this "imperfect" or prefix form is often used in past
> >>and present contexts, and that the main element distinguishing it from
> >>the "perfect" or suffix form is that the action is continuing or
> >>repetitive, like the Russian imperfective aspect.
> >>
> >Peter forgot to tell that this is not a fact, but a convenient option for
> >exegesis.
>
> Well, if not a "fact", a word I didn't use, it has certainly been the
> predominant scholarly understanding for well over a century.
>

Barr dealt with such "understandings."

> >Russian, for that matter, has both tenses and aspects. English, too, has
> >aspects, though they are grammatical constructs, not single words. What
> >language has aspects but not tenses? Nonsense.
> >
> Chinese. Arabic. Burmese. Many others - although sometimes not quite
> purely so. This is not nonsense.
>

Nonsense, Peter, nonsense. Arabic perfect is in no way--absolutely no
way--different from the past tense. To say, "he was doing smth and stopped
the action, though not completed it" you would use perfect, though the
action is imperfect. So it is past tense.
Arabic has standard instrument for the future tense, sa- prefix. In other
words, Arabic has past (perfect), present (perfect), and future (sa-)
tenses.

Vadim Cherny