Biblical Hebrew Forum

[David Kummerow <farmerjoeblo AT hotmail.com>]

Hi Rolf,

Thanks again for your discussion.


> 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.
>  >

Your promting here has caused me to relook at the pronunciation this 
morning. And I think you are correct in saying that vocalic shewa is 
phonologically realised as similar to pathah. This could be due to that 
fact that /a/ in Hebrew by the time of the Masoretes did not 
phonemically oppose front and back open vowels. Since shewa is sort of a 
half-way vowel between the two (and whatever other /a/ varients their 
may have been) it probably was spoken similarly to pathah. With the 
accent ga'ya it would have been very similar. (However, when shewa 
preceeded a guttural consonant, it took the quality of the the vowel 
following the guttural in pronunciation; preceeding yod, it had the 
quality of short [i].)

Now in saying this, I still think it is necessary to see that that the 
Masoretes still used shewa. That is, they must have viewed the syllable 
with shewa as different from one with a full vowel. Even with ga'ya, 
shewa or the hatep vowel is not replaced by a full vowel. This 
difference was probably, if shewa and /a/ were pronounced similarly, one 
of length, the length with ga'ya still differing from a full vowel (this 
differs from a hatep vowel on a non-guttural consonant, which when 
lengthened by ga'ya did receive a full vowel). Thus the syllable 
structure of wayyiqtol differed from weyiqtol: CVC-CVC-CVC for the 
former and CeCVC-CVC for the latter ("e" represents the epenthetic 
vowel). The more abstract phonological syllable (which Khan strongly 
argues is the determinant of vowel quantity) could thus be represented 
as /way-yiq-tol/ and /wyiq-tol/, which when realised in speech requires 
the epenthetic vowel.

Now I take it that these differences are semantic. As I understand it, 
grammaticalisation works in the direction of loss of semantic meaning 
and not the other way around. Thus the differences above between 
wayyiqtol and yiqtol are somehow semantic as well as the apocopation 
differences point strongly in the direction of two different verbs with 
two different meanings. The evidence from other semitic languages 
suggests that the difference is between short and long prefix verbs, the 
first a preterite and the second a present-future-imperfective verb. The 
use of the two verbs in BH in my reading confirms the hypothesis: 
wayyiqtol is reguarly employed as a preterite verb (past-perfective) and 
 yiqtol is reguarly employed as a present-future-imperfective (although 
I do think that the participle is becoming the regular means of 
expressing the present tense).

Perhaps the reason why we differ so much here is in our theoretical 
stance towards (morpho)syntactical differences in that my first 
inclination is to suspect some meaning difference, which you seem to be 
inclined to firstly suspect no meaning difference. Is this a correct 
assessment do you think?


>  > 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.
>  >

And as most other have consistently said, there IS a distinction between 
wayyiqtol and (we)yiqtol - the reason why they a written differently. (I 
do agree regarding qatal/weqatal.) Note that for you to achieve the 
result you have you have had to:

1. Disregard the consistent orthographic (and the phonological 
realisation of it) distinction between wayyiqtol and weyiqtol which 
suggests for most people some semantic difference.

2. Some apocopation differences between to the two forms which again 
suggests to most people some semantic difference and different verb 
forms. Further to this point is the use of long and short prefix verbs 
in other semitic languages used as in hebrew for 
present-future-imperfective and preterite.

3. Argue that even if there are differences between the two forms they 
arose by their use in different text types rather than from two 
different prefix verbs being used in two different text types due to 
their different semantics.

4. The modification of the term "aspect" unlike what is needed for other 
languages.


Point 3) is where the rubber really hits the road, but I don't really 
see any way of resolving the matter one way or the other as we both 
differ so fundamentally in our views regarding 1), 2), and 3). Because 
we don't have the Masoretes around to ask and we don't have texts 
displaying the arising use of either the clitic involved with wayyiqtol 
on the one hand or the evidence necessary to confirm your divergent 
opinion on the matter on the other hand, I see no way forward. In the 
lack of any agreement regarding points 1), 2), and 3) we will remain 
with our different views because we read the evidence and approach the 
evidence entirely differently.



>  > 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. 

I strongly suspected you mightn't. That's OK, we'll just continue to 
differ because of the points I made above regarding or fundamental 
differences in approaching the data.

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