Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Dave Washburn <dwashbur AT nyx.net>]

Hi Herman,

On Saturday 26 November 2005 01:28, Herman Meester wrote:
> Hi David,
> Thanks, I'm interested in anything related to this subject.
> Of course you are right about the fact I was exaggerating in my
> expectation about Hatav's theory. Just me ;)  However, as I have been
> thinking this way for five years now, I was so surprised to see that
> Galia Hatav now comes up with the same theory simultaneously, that I'm
> really convinced of it.
>
> One very important thing to note about this theory:
> It is NOT the "definite article" which is "inside" of wayyiqtol!

Agreed.

> One the contrary, *both* wayyiqtol and [ha-+dagesh] have the same
> gemination in common, which "anchors" nouns and verbs "to the world".

This may have possibilities.  I call the prefix a specified grammatical 
formative, an affix that performs a specific function.  In my view, it 
signals a syntactic break with what precedes and is unrelated to the 
conjunction.  Details are in my 1994 paper "Chomsky's Separation of Syntax 
and Semantics" in the journal Hebrew Studies.  Since I wrote that paper 
(originally presented at the Linguistics and Biblical Hebrew unit of the SBL 
at the 1992 meeting in San Francisco), of course, Galia's monograph appeared 
and she set out her views about modality.  I have found that her modality 
approach dovetails nicely with my approach, so that some forms signal 
"realis" mode with or without syntactic connection, while others signal 
"irrealis" mode with or without syntactic connection.  Unfortunately, I 
haven't had much time the past few years to get all this down in a 
publishable form, but hope springs eternal...

> I say this because many people laugh at the theory saying, "yeah
> right, how on earth can there be a definite article in a Hebrew yiqtol
> verb?"
> Well, that's of course an incorrect rendering of the theory.
>
> Why do I believe in this theory?
> First, it meets a very important criterium in science:
> "The simpler, more elegant, and more surprising theory, that can
> account for *more* phenomena with *less* hypotheses, or only one
> hypothesis, is to be preferred."
> I don't know who said this but I'm quoting what I remember some
> British guy has written.

Agreed.  I set forth two rules in my paper: simplicity, and unifying factors. 
 
Whereas semantics - the meanings of words and phrases, including pragmatics - 
often has no rhyme or reason behind the developments of word meanings, I 
believe syntactic uses have some sort of unifying factor that ties them all 
together in some way.

> Anyway, don't you think the Hatav theory explains both article and
> wayyiqtol with only one hypothesis?

I don't think I've seen this particular reference.  Is it in her monograph or 
something that has appeared since then?

> I'll paste my own article here (you can find it below) where you can
> find sound proof for at least the fact that the Hebrew article is most
> probably only the gemination. I see no reason why primarily gemination
> would not be the case in wayyiqtol.

I haven't had a chance to read the article yet, but in my own article I made 
extensive use of the fact that we're not dealing with an attached W, but with 
an attached WA. combination, i.e. 
waw+a-class-vowel+duplication-of-next-consonant.  So it sounds as though 
we're on the same page there.

> By the way, that article was never published because a while after I
> wrote it (it's not even finished) I read Hatav's piece, making my own
> superfluous.

I hate it when that happens.

> What you say about the one yiqtol not being the other yiqtol is important.
> We may disagree with Hatav on her assertion that synchronically,
> there's only one yiqtol.

I don't.  I think the extrapolation that Rainey and others have done is far 
beyond what the material can support.

> Of course, we have this diachronically supposed "preterite yiqtol".
> However, if I'm correct and I might not, the diachronically supposed
> proto-Canaanite past tense yiqtol (with yussive shortness if I'm
> correct) is supposed *on the basis of* the very same Hebrew wayyiqtol,
> and Arabic lam yaqtul, both of which can be explained by Hatav's
> theory, if applied to Arabic, too: simply dissimilation of a geminated
> prefix consonant. Although I immediately admit, that is of course
> rather speculative. But on the other hand we have to be wary of
> circular reasoning when we suppose a preterite yiqtol next to others.
>
> In fact, imagine we do take the preterite yiqtol's existence for
> granted, wayyiqtol does not even uniformly have mil'el
> stress/apocopated forms, so what can we say about it? Are then both
> "preterite" and "modal" yiqtols possible in wayyiqtol? In that case, I
> think, synchronically speaking, the "several types of
> yiqtol"-distinction has apparently become so blurred that there really
> was only one yiqtol.

My paper deals with this idea, as well, q.v.  It's available in an older form 
at my website by following the "credentials" link, which actually takes you 
to my CV.

> The thing you said about the first temple period and bible book
> dating, admitting it is important for syntax in some cases, I wonder
> if that is really so crucial here. I things such as the "priestly
> code", like Gen 1-2,3(4?) are to be dated after or in the Galut Bavel,
> which is fine with me although I'm not really a theologian, it can
> hardly be dated much later. There will always be people who date this
> book early and that book late. For example, I am absolutely convinced
> that the book Ruth is very old, first temple period, probably written
> for one of the Davidic kings, in order to get rid of the annoying
> "buzz" among the people that one of David's ancestors was a Moabite. I
> can't find any more sound reason for that book having been written
> than that. The Hebrew's old too. However, there are many people who'd
> say that's nonsense, the book was written half a millennium or more
> later, it's a little social novel about an immigrant worker and her
> lot and so on. I had this discussion about that with Atalya Brenner,
> the feminist, but no way of coming near each other's point of view.
> Now my point. Having said the above, how can we come up with any
> theory about Hebrew syntax at all, if we cannot decide for ourselves a
> body of texts to study a certain phenomenon in, just because others
> may say the dating of these books is controversial? Anything
> concerning the Hebrew Bible is controversial.

I don't have a problem with early-dating any of them, and to be quite frank, 
even if I'm wrong, I don't think that the dating question affects our view of 
the grammar to any appreciable degree.

> The grammar of Joüon-Muraoka has quite a few errors or very doubtful
> suppositions too, yet it is very frequently quoted and often as
> "proof". The most crucial error being that poetry examples are being
> quoted to back up syntactical hypotheses for prose, which is
> inacceptable. The book's still for sale though.

Yeah, I already ordered the electronic version for my Logos program :-)  I 
haven't read much of it, so I'll reserve judgment for now.  I have worked 
extensively with the original Jouon grammar, and one of the things I 
appreciated about it was his conclusion that biblical Hebrew was SVO in its 
base structure.  I don't know yet what Muraoka may or may not have done with 
that.

> Sorry for all that, just thought you were a little too strict on
> Hatav's article ;)
>
> What I would like you, well anyone I guess, to ask is: present us a
> better, simpler, more elegant theory than this, or better even, why
> don't you try to look at the BHebrew texts supposing the theory (as if
> you actually believe it yourself), only to give it up when you really
> find something that contradicts it.
> That would be an interesting experiment of thought.

Been  there, done that.  My earlier article in Trinity Journal on the Josiah 
story used F. I. Andersen's categories of the wayyiqtol, an approach that I 
later had to abandon when I started examining transformational-generative 
grammar and realized that Andersen hadn't - indeed couldn't - achieve 
explanatory adequacy, just descriptive.

> My opinion of science is, it has to provide the best and simplest
> hypotheses to explain certain phenomena, for the time being, until an
> even better one is given, so after testing that hypothesis, we may or
> may not accept it.

Yup.

> There may never be actual *proof* for any theory concerning wayyiqtol.
> However, *ALL other theories* I have seen so far are either unlikely,
> need too many additional hypotheses, or are too far-fetched to be
> taken seriously.

As Gordon Lewis used to say in his theology classes (I was required to take 
them, though I hate theology!), the goal is to find the approach that best 
explains the evidence with the smallest number of problems.

> Theories don't always have to be proved, the proof is in that they
> *work*. This works!

So does mine ;-)

> Thanks for reading all this.
> Must be tiresome ;)
> Btw I really appreciate reactions like yours to this "gemination
> first"-theory. Most people don't take it seriously in the first place,
> so thank you for that.

I hope we can continue this exchange, and I hope to be able to interact more 
effectively once I have read the article below, which I have snipped in this 
post for the sake of bandwidth.

-- 
Dave Washburn
http://www.nyx.net/~dwashbur
"Maybe I'll trade it for a new hat."