Biblical Hebrew Forum

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

> > Now, that is curious. First you disputed that Russian speakers mean 
> > future tense when they write it in historical mood, which parallels 
> > English "future in the past" and Hebrew deictic shifts like in Gen2:6. I 
> > sent you an article on Russian grammar confirming my views. Now you want 
> > to dispute the same obvious fact for Semitic languages. ...
>
> The article you sent me was mostly about the historic present, found in 
> many languages, which in Russian sometimes uses normally future forms.

This is the closest I could find to Wade's nonsensical "historical 
perfective future." Russian speakers recognize it as future tense with a 
twist, but English speakers have no linguistic mould for such expressions, 
and invent a separate mood for them. Don't you see the same thing happening 
in regard to Hebrew? You attempt to interpret perfectly sensible future 
tense as aspects, and find that yiqtol doesn't fit your aspects, and invent 
more and wider aspects to fit yiqtol into, and still fail. Just because you 
don't recognize that some people have different linguistic assumptions from 
you. Hebrews, like Russians, used future tense where you are not accustomed 
to.

> Now I wonder whether those who speak or write the historic present, in any 
> language, are making a conscious deictic shift, or are simply using the 
> verb forms in an idiomatic way. An interesting question to which I have no 
> clear answer.

Are you conscious is walking down the street? No.Walking is unconscious. And 
so is breathing. And so are deictic shifts. That doesn't make them less 
real.

> > ... Ok, go on. How is that clear from cognate languages that ci-yiqtol is 
> > not etymologically future?
>
> Look at the cognates of the YIQTOL form and you will find that they are 
> consistently imperfective rather than future.

Yeah? I have heard that reasoning about Tanakh, and so far it failed on all 
the examples offered. Would you offer a cognate yiqtol which is clearly not 
future?

> > Isaiah, for example, deliberately used in Is53 archaic turns from Job. 
> > Other writers decidedly used wayiqtols to impute the sense of archaicity 
> > to the narration. Of course, writing in perhaps the fifth century, they 
> > were concerned to make their writings sound ancient.
> Isaiah 53 is not narrative but poetry.

That is your assumption. I read it as historical narrative, semi-poetic 
perhaps.

> I accept that in some places there may be deliberate archaism (as 
> suggested for Esther) and in others quotations from older books. But, 
> unless you can provide evidence to the contrary, I shall continue to 
> assume that the narrative style of the great bulk of the Hebrew Torah and 
> historical books is in the natural narrative style of the time when it was 
> written or edited, and not in a deliberately archaic style.

Ok, you are back in the sixth century and you claim to find an old 
Deuteronomy scroll which, of course, you just made up yourself. Are you 
going to write it in contemporary tongue? Just look at those modern books on 
religion: the writers unconsciously switch to archaisms. The same is true of 
much of historical books.

Vadim Cherny