Biblical Hebrew Forum

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

> I accept that my thinking can never be entirely free of presuppositions 
> from English but seek to minimise them. Whereas you seem to openly proud 
> that you are using presuppositions from Russian and inviting others to 
> share them.
>
> In fact the theory of aspects as a whole depends more on Russian grammar 
> than on English. The theory of the Hebrew verb which I and most scholars 
> hold to depends I think on close analogies noted between Hebrew and 
> Russian - analogies which you have failed to recognise.
How so? You just wrote that I unduly depend upon Russian-language mode of 
using future tense. And I repeatedly argued that Russian resembles Hebrew 
very much in numerous subtle respects.
Russian aspects are indeed similar to Hebrew. But Hebrew modeles aspects 
with agglutinative prefixes and with participles, not with verb forms which 
are reserved for tenses.


> > ... How could we know what Hebrews meant by ci-yiqtol or "future in the 
> > past"? ...
>
> We cannot know exactly what Hebrews meant by KIY YIQTOL (although I don't 
> see any particular link between these two words), which means that your 
> description of its as "future in the past" is baseless speculation.

ha! by that token, everything is baseless speculation. You, who continuously 
invoke imperfectly known cognates (whose interpretation much depends on our 
knowledge of Hebrew, anyway), reject interpretation by analogy here! You 
invoke examples from Arabic which is a separate branch from classical 
Hebrew, and remote at that, but object to analogies from Russian, even 
though Old Russian language is heavily indebted to Hebrew.

Vadim Cherny