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b-hebrew - Re: [b-hebrew] tenses

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  • From: "Vadim Cherny" <VadimCherny AT mail.ru>
  • To: "Peter Kirk" <peterkirk AT qaya.org>
  • Cc: b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] tenses
  • Date: Fri, 23 Sep 2005 14:37:35 +0300

This makes two of us. In fact, I have an impression that had Rolf been born into Russian as the mother tongue, and see the Tanakh through Russian grammatical assumptions regarding the use of future tense, we would have no problem coming to a common ground.

This sounds like an admission that your theory is dependent on presuppositions from Russian.

Or that your theory depends on presuppositions from English?
Every language has idioms and some specifics in using the word forms. Three thousand years from now, a Russian speaker reading English "I was going" would interpret it as causative.
How could we know what Hebrews meant by ci-yiqtol or "future in the past"? Only by comparing those turns to similar turns in current languages. Russian has exactly such turns, and English - remotely similar.
Perhaps Swahili has the same turns, I don't know. I use the languages I know to bring the examples.
Russian is a good candidate for comparison with Hebrew because of the well-attested similarities: grammaticalized aspects (agglutinated prepositions and participles in Hebrew), common etymological relationships, improbable correlations like cohortative hey (na) and Russian cohortative suffix ka. If deictic shifts, common in Russian, explain Hebrew usage of future tense in similar environments, then likely Hebrews indeed understood future tense in the same way as Russians, prone to deictic shifts. If exactly the same turn as ci-yiqtol exists in Russian, and makes perfect reading of Hebrew text without compromising the future tense of yiqtol, then likely ci-yiqtol has similar idiomatic meaning.

Vadim Cherny




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