Biblical Hebrew Forum

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

> >Waw-reversive, in that scenario, just reverses tenses: weqatal is
> >archaic future, while wayiqtol is pseudo-archaic past.
>
> Is there any evidence that weqatal is archaic?  Do we have clear
> evidence that it was used in any popular dialect that predates Hebrew?
> And if we do, is there any reasonable theory that explain why this
> archaic element alone is so prevelent in classical Hebrew?
>
> And what is "pseudo-archaic"?

I agree with you that allusion to archaic is frequently misused. I offer no
more than hypothesis.

First, hophal seems sufficiently ancient, and it is reasonable to suggest
that similarly reversive function of waw in weqatal is also ancient.

Second, having semantically similar weqatal and yiqtol is otherwise
extremely economical Hebrew (no characteristic excessiveness of non-Semitic
languages) would be strange. Likely, only one form originally existed. If
the original form is yiqtol, it is hard to conceive a need for weqatal. If,
however, weqatal was the original, the reason for adding yiqtol is fair: it
already developed de-facto from the imperative mood.

After invention of yiqtol, grammar became asymmetrical: two forms for the
future (weqatal and yiqtol), one for the past). Wayiqtol, then, is an
artificial form modeled upon weqatal. No wonder that yiqtol is predominantly
used to impute a sense of archaic to narration.

Wayiqtol has plenty of exceptions in stress and shortening. Such a volume of
exceptions is not characteristic of other Hebrew forms which were used for
long time.Yiqtol in Tanakh are "raw," thus the number of exceptions.

Vadim Cherny