Biblical Hebrew Forum

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

> > 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