Biblical Hebrew Forum

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

> There is a national language institute in the Philippines
> as well as language departments in the many fine
> Universities there where native speaking scholar study
> Tagalog and other Austronesian languages.  The geographic
> ranges of these languages stretch from Madagascar to Taiwan
> to Easter Island and many have long histories of written
> literature with a variety of alphabets and syllabaries
> (Roman, Arabic, Indian, and indignous).  You may rest
> assured that the characterization of verb inflection for
> aspect and not tense is not some artificially imposed
> construct from ignorant outsiders but very much how the
> native scholars view the issue.
>

I can't argue about Tagalog, of course. Never even heard about it before.
But I really, really wonder if it is possible to establish a subtle
difference of meaning between imperfect and future tense based on
commentaries of the natives. Could there be a similar bias as in Hebrew,
where scholars did not recognize deictic center shifts and took future for
imperfect?

Vadim Cherny