Biblical Hebrew Forum

[David Kummerow <farmerjoeblo AT hotmail.com>]

Hi Rolf,

Again, see below:


> Dear Peter,
>
> You paint a carricature of my position. In view of all the times we have
> discussed Hebrew verbs, you should be able to do better. I do not deny
> exceptions and a substandard use of language. What I challenge is ad hoc
> explanations in order to save a hypothesis. Therefore I make a linguistic
> demand that exceptions must be explained. For example, In the 19th century
> QATAL was viewed as past tense, and at the end of the century, as past 
> tense
> or the perfective aspect. It was discovered that several QATALs had future
> reference, and in order to save the theory, the "prophetic perfect" was
> postulated, the action was completed in the mind of the prophet. (A. B.
> Davidson (1894) "Hebrew syntax") is a good example. The view has later been
> parroted by different grammarians, but I have never seen anyone proving the
> claim.

I agree. But the all can be either seen to be cosubordinate, or 
rhetorical/exaggerated futures, or viewed as the prophetical recounting 
of a vision (see Rogland).

> The principle of a property being uncancellable is very simple: Even a
> shoolboy understands that the clauses "I will come yesterday" and "I came
> tomorrow" are ungrammatical. There is no purpose in trying to find a 
> special situation where one of the clauses can be used.

So to in BH: note the distributional verbal restrictions between 
'ethmol, 'emesh, `attah, and machar.

> If QATAL represents past tense, a reasonable number cannot have future
> reference. If we find 1,000 examples of QATAL future reference, these are
> too many to say they are exceptions. The fact that some words have a
> substandard use is not relevant in the literary text of the Tanakh, and
> neither is the fact that words may behave strange in strange contexts. We
> cannot argue that the "dominant use" of the QATAL is past (53.5 %  have 
> past
> reference), therefore it is a past tense. Even though we reduced the number
> with future references to 500 or 300, and they occurred in normal contexts,
> still we could not accept that QATAL is a past tense. The only way to 
> uphold
> the past tense view of QATAL would be to demonstrate (not just claim) that
> the examples with future reference were exceptions. That would include
> showing how and why they were exceptions.

I disagree that a past tense view of qatal needs to demonstrate future 
tense uses of qatal as exceptions. That is because I do not agree with 
your principal of uncancellablility. Non-prototypicality or fuzziness is 
simply part and parcel of language. When we come to diachronic change 
within verbal paradigms, this should not be unexpected. Especially so 
when a form with varying uses comes to be integrated within the verbal 
paradigm as qatal has. The future tense use of qatal is one of the 
functions of qatal, as is its past tense use. The past tense use is both 
statistically dominant, but it is also constructionally the most 
specific, as Anstey points out. Hence my choice of the functional past 
tense label.


> The points above do not indicate a static view of language. In my
> dissertation there is a detailed analysis of Hebrew verbs from a diachronic
> point of view. The conclusion is that while the language to some extent 
> do change in the
> youngest books of the Tanakh, the evidence is that the meaning of the verbs
> has not changed.
>
>
> Best regards,
>
> Rolf Furuli
> Univeersity of Oslo


Regards,
David Kummerow.