Biblical Hebrew Forum

[David Kummerow <farmerjoeblo AT hotmail.com>]

Hi Rolf,

My answers will be numbered in response to your questions:

1. Sorry, a typo. I meant Gen 18:10: 'ashub "I will return." This verb, 
I take it, refers not to an incomplete or differentiated action, but to 
a whole, complete one in the future. It does not refer to an iterative 
action, nor to some sort of incomplete action ("will begin to return", etc).

2. With "complete" vis-a-vis "completed" I'm simply trying to get away 
from tying aspect to time - "completed" to me implied just that, a 
completed action and hence one performed in the past.

3. Only in the sense that they are grammatical categories that other 
languages have grammaticalised and so may well be applicable to BH. I 
think it is fairly clear from Andersen's and Cook's work that these are 
useful categories for pre-BH/Canaanite. The difficult question is BH. I 
position it a little further on the grammaticalisation path to tense 
than what they do due to the points I raised in my earlier post to 
George. BH has not fully moved from its aspectual heritage, however - 
cf, eg, the prefix verb in Gen 2:6 used to express iterative action in 
the past, etc.

4. My impression is that aspect is the same, but the interaction of 
individual lexical items, verbal complements, aspect, and Aktionsart 
will vary cross-linguistically. But we've been over this ground before...

Regards,
David Kummerow.

> Dear David,
>
> I have the following questions:
>
> 1) Which verb in Gen 18:11 do you have in mind?
>
> 2) What actually is a "complete" action? How is such an action different
> from a "completed" action?
>
> 3) How can we know that the opposition "complete and undifferentiated"
> versus "incomplete and differentiated" can be applied to Hebrew aspects?
>
> 4) Are aspects in all aspectual languages exactly the same, "complete and
> undifferentiated versus incomplete and differentiated"? How can we 
> know the
> answer?
>
>
> Best regards,
>
> Rolf Furuli Ph.D
> University of Oslo