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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 15:42:13 +0300

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




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