Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Herman Meester <crazymulgogi AT gmail.com>]

The same applies to the verbal tense categories that had been given to
the qatal and yiqtol "tenses": I wonder if people still use the term
"future" for the yiqtol, which is absurd. Unfortunately, Joüon-Muraoka
(a weird book by the way) uses the word, [although I wonder if Muraoka
actually believes Joüon on this point! I have attended Muraoka's
classes on Hebrew grammar in Leiden and I think he knows better than
that] and they say this book is widely used.
"Perfect/imperfect" is already a little better. Using these terms
started for Arabic by the way.
David, do you also think there are no adjectives in Hebrew? Just that
we cannot easily distinguish the form of adjectives from the form of
nouns, is it an argument? In English we say there are adjectives, yet
they usually don't have any morphological distinction from nouns
either. But I'm open for any fresh understanding of this.

You know? I think that a lot of people that have been studying Hebrew
have this weird tendency to write a grammar of Biblical Hebrew. I
think we have to suppress this tendency in ourselves. There are no
plenty of grammars around and they'll all have something we disagree
with. No wonder if they're grammars intended for the entire MT.

So dear people out there: STOP writing GRAMMARS!
;)

PS I was just thinking, let's call "wayyiqtol" the hebrew "Aorist" ;)
^^
Regards, Herman

2005/11/24, David Kummerow <farmerjoeblo AT hotmail.com>:
>
> I very much agree (others won't, of course). In my view, Hebrew needs to
> be analysed in an of itself, with the categories the language itself
> distributionally reveals. Syntactic categories like "nominative" just
> don't figure in *Hebrew* syntax, at least at the diachronic stage
> represented in MT. Some even have trouble with "adjectives" in Hebrew
> (see, eg, D. J. Kamhi, "The Term tō'ar in Hebrew and Its Status as a
> Grammatical Category," BSOAS 34 (1971), 256-272; Joüon and Muraoka, §86).
>
> In terms of general linguistics, even categories like "subject" and
> object" are not seen to be universal by some; see eg:
>
> Dryer, Matthew S. "Are Grammatical Relations Universal?" Pages 115-143
> in Essays on Language Function and Language Type: Dedicated to T. Givón.
> Edited by Joan Bybee, John Haiman, and Sandra A. Thompson.
> Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1997.
>
> Foley, William A. and Robert D. van Valin, Jr. "On the Viability of the
> Notion of 'Subject' in Universal Grammar." Berkeley Linguistics Society
> 3 (1977): 293-320.
>
> I realise that some theoretical positions will not accept, nor tolerate,
> such a view.
>
> Regards,
> David Kummerow.
>
>
>
> > Thanks David for these titles;
> > Of course, I only object to the use of words like accusative etc.
> > because they are categories that designate usually case ending in
> > Greek, Latin and German, for example, and are independent of things
> > like object, subject, etc.
> > For example, in one semitic language I know of, the nominal predicate
> > in a verbal clause (for example "Xsubj was Ypred") has the accusative!
> > Which in Greek, Latin, etc. would be unthinkable.
> > So because of that reason I think descriptive grammars shouldn't
> > import stuff we don't need. For example, we could say that there's a
> > "dative" in a word like ??? lakhem, because it often functions in a
> > similar way as "you" in "we told you". But there is no dative at all,
> > there's just ? L and a suffix ?? KM. In theory there would be a
> > genitive, because in some other Semitic languages all prepositions
> > have what is called a genitive.
> > Yours,
> > Herman
> >
>
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