Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Awohili AT aol.com]

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.