Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Michael Abernathy <mabernathy AT isot.com>]

Vadim,
Do you realize that you have just defined the Hebrew future so that it 
includes the present?


Vadim Cherny wrote:

> > Tense describes the reference time from narrator's point of view.
> >
> > That is to say, future tense must refer to the future from the
> > narrator's
> > deictic centre, and past tense likewise.
> >
> > Now, narrator's deictic centre might be shifted, and so future tense
> > sometimes refers to the past events - from the point of view of the
> > reader
> > or of narrator's contemporaries. This is still future tense.
> >
> > Does that seem reasonable?
> >
> >
> > SB: Perfectly reasonable. And how many tenses do you recognize?
> >    
>
> qatal - past
> weqatal - future. Note common role of waw as reversing device in
> qatal/weqatal and hiphil/hophal.
> q'tol - imperative
> yiqtol - late form of the future tense, derived from imperative
> wayiqtol - last form of the past tense, symmetrically modeled upon weqatal.
> Note its predominant usage to impute the sense of archaic narration.
> Hebrew doesn't have present tense, and rightly so: an action is either ended
> (thus past tense), or continues into the future (thus, FT).  The qotel form
> is late and is not really a verb.
>
> Vadim Cherny
>
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>
>
>  



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