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  • From: "Rolf Furuli" <furuli AT online.no>
  • To: <b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] Hebrew grammar, (was Zech 6:8)
  • Date: Sun, 27 Nov 2005 10:46:11 -0000


Dear David,

See my comments below.

----- Original Message ----- From: "David Kummerow" <farmerjoeblo AT hotmail.com>
To: <b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org>
Sent: Sunday, November 27, 2005 10:47 AM
Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] Hebrew grammar, (was Zech 6:8)



Hi Rolf,

I've just gotten home and in checking my email I see much more has been
written. I hope to write more in the morning, but before I head off to
bed again (the reality of being a human!), just a quick question
regarding your response to Herman.

RF:
The Masoretes would not dream of inventing anything new. They were
extremely
careful to point and vocalize the text exactly as they heard it recited in
the synagogue. However, the recitation of a narrative text would
probably be
different from the recitation of a hortatory or future text. My suggestion
is that verbs in a narrative text were recited with retracted stress,
causing a closed syllable with patah and gemination (the WAY- prefix),
while
this was not the case with hortatory and future texts (which got the
WE-prefix). Since patah and shewa were pronounced similarly, this was for
the Masoretes simply a matter of stress and intonation and not a semantic
distinction. But later grammarians misunderstood this, and ascribed a
semantic
distinction to the difference between WE- and WAY-, and the consecutive
model was born.

I am wondering what your evidence for pathah being pronounced similarly
to shewa is? I thought that that shewa only approached such a
pronunciation when it received the ga'ya accent. I could be wrong, but
then I am also convinced that the grammaticalisation of Hebrew by the
stage of the Masoretes meant that a seven vowel system was in place.
This has bearing on the pronunciation of shewa and syllable structure.

RF: G.Kahn (2000) "The Early Karaite Tradition of hebrew Grammatical Thought" p. 31 says: "Various passages in the Diqduq reflect the fact that vocalic shewa was pronounced with the same quality as patah." See also K. Lewy (1936) "Zur Masoretischen Grammatik" and T. Harviainen (1977) "On the vocalization of closed unstressed syllables in Hebrew." Studia Orientalia, 48, 1.

Everyone else seems to argue the other way round to you: everyone else
seems to argue for two forms with different semantics, the reason for
which they are used in different text-types; whereas you seem to argue
for one form being used across the board and then only secondarily
becoming differentiated.

Some scholars have viewed WAYYIQTOL as semantically identical with YIQTOL, but they are few. There are two basic problems for scholars of Hebrew:

1) That classical Hebrew has four different conjugations is a model or paradigm. Students are immersed into it and take it for granted. The possibility that this can be wrong is not even considered. When the students become professors, they entertain the same views.

2) Very few Hebrew scholars have a linguistic background which can help them look at the Hebrew grammar with new linguistic eyes.

As I have already said, there is no distinction between WAYYIQTOL/WEYIQTOL and QATAL/WEQATAL before the Masoretes. My study of practically all finite and infinite verbs in classical Hebrew has revealed, at least to me, that all prefix-forms can be viewed as one semantic unit, and the same is true with the suffix-forms. The functional distinctions can be easily explained on the basis of fundamental linguistic concepts.

What do you make of the differences in the hiphil?

RF:
I view apocopation basically as a non-semantic phonetic phenomenon. Interestingly, apocopation is related to grammatical person, and this suggests its non-semantic nature. Regarding WAYYIQTOL I found that 98.7% of 3.p. s. m. were apocopated, but only 33,1% of 1. p. s., and 25,0% of 3. p. pl. m.

What do you make of word order and mood, that is, do you agree with
Holmstedt, Niccacci, Cook, etc that modal word order is prefix verb
first and indicative word order is prefix verb second?

RF:
Generally, yes, but there are so many exceptions that the rule simply breaks down. When I see a clause-initial YIQTOL, my first question is whether it is modal. When I see a clause-initial QATAL, my first question is whether this is direct speech. But in both cases the context has the final say.

Do you agree that
the more fixed word order in this regard is due to the two forms (ie
jussive and indicative verbs) have become the same (except for some
verbs in hiphil) due to grammaticalisation?

Not at all! I agree with Cook in his criticism of discourse analysis as a tool to pinpoint semantic meaning. (But Niccacci has made several interesting observations; I refer to seven of his writings in my dissertation.) I see no grammaticalization process in connection with short and long forms in Hebrew. We have exactly the same situation in Akkadian, Aramaic and Ugaritic. Both long and short prefix forms can be used to express modal and indicative forms.

Regards,
David Kummerow.


Best regards

Rolf Furuli
University of Oslo




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