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  • From: Awohili AT aol.com
  • To: b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] Daniel 6:27 (time indefinite) II
  • Date: Tue, 15 Nov 2005 08:56:21 EST


I, too, am a native speaker of English, and to me "to time indefinite" and
"indefinitely" signal the same thing.

Unless you have counted the number of years that make up "forever," it is
indeed an "indefinite" or "indefinitely-lasting" time. Otherwise, how long
is
"forever"?

But as I said before, to each his own. "Time indefinite" works for me, as
well as a fair number of other native speakers of English I know.

Solomon Landers

In a message dated 11/15/2005 3:39:27 A.M. Pacific Standard Time,
peter AT qaya.org writes:

No, Rolf, as a native speaker I must insist that, although "indefinite"
and "indefinitely" are etymologically related, these two sentences have
quite different meanings. Well, the first one doesn't really have any
meaning, but I understand it as meaning the same as "The earth stands
for an indefinite time", in other words "The earth stands now, but it is
quite unknown how long it will stand for". Whereas the latter more or
less means "The earth stands for ever". You cannot argue that because
two sentences have comparable syntactic structure they have the same
meaning.









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