Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Kim Chua <s_kim_chua AT yahoo.com>]

I have checked the English translation for
Proverbs 25:23 and found the following:

In English (can't type in Hebrew yet on this new
computer): The North Wind (verb) the rain and
an angry face, the tongue (verb).

One translation gives the verbs as 'drives away';
while some others give them as 'brings forth'.
What is the literal translation?

We don't have the North Wind here so I can't
tell if it brings forth the rain or drives it away.
I suppose both translations are right depending
on where the speaker is.  Those in the south
gets the rain. But what about the tongue and 
the angry face?

Kim Chua
Hebrew 101student
Singapore


 
 
---------------------------------
Don't pick lemons.
See all the new 2007 cars at Yahoo! Autos.
>From yitzhaksapir AT gmail.com  Wed Mar  7 09:03:23 2007
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Date: Wed, 7 Mar 2007 16:03:20 +0200
From: "Yitzhak Sapir" <yitzhaksapir AT gmail.com>
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Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] Verbal Aspect (was Tenses - Deut 6:4)
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On 3/7/07, Peter Kirk wrote:
> On 07/03/2007 11:09, Rolf Furuli wrote:
> > Dear Peter,
> >
> > Here you completely miss the mark!  The point is as follows: All linguists
> > know, and ordinary people know that some verbs can refer to the past 
> > because
> > the verb forms themselves have an intrinsic past tense, and other verbs 
> > can
> > in one context refer to the past and in other contexts to the future. This
> > is absolutely not theory-dependent, since this is a fact that no one would
> > dispute. ...
>
> Rolf, I'm sorry, but I don't know this, neither as a linguist nor as an
> ordinary person, and I do dispute it. As an ordinary person, I have no
> conscious understanding of any distinctions of this sort, I simply use
> and understand verbs and other parts of language. As a linguist, I am
> aware that in some languages in many circumstances there are clear
> distinctions of this kind, but I am also aware of examples where there
> is no clear distinction, such as where a verb form which ordinarily has
> a past meaning (in a loose sense of the word) can also be used in a
> non-past way.

It appears to me that this is the issue raised by Peter T. Daniels quoted
here: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ANE-2/message/3616

It seems you also mentioned it in this regard here:
https://lists.ibiblio.org/sympa/arc/b-hebrew/1999-October/004532.html

It is unclear if Rolf responded to the post in October.

The response to Daniels is in the same above message: "The problem
with Comrie as far as aspect is concerned is that he does not make a
clear distinction between aspect and Aktionsart. That causes much
confusion, and I recomend the criticism of this in Broman Olsen (1997)."

Now reading a little of what Comrie says (from the quotes by Rolf and
Peter Kirk), it appears to me that Peter Kirk's suggestion of relationship
to Classical Arabic is very much in place.

Also important to be kept in mind in relation to Biblical Hebrew as a
dead language is that Biblical Hebrew preserves in its forms a possibly
wider variety that existed when those forms were written.  This wider
variety may cause exceptions to appear.  We saw an example of this
recently with the Qal perfect form which appears to be preserved in
Biblical Hebrew as a sort of "Pual" but it is in reality a form that
existed when the texts were written, and Biblical Hebrew, being as it
is the development of that earlier language into the Massoretic time,
did not preserve it correctly.  A different issue is the yaqtul / yaqtulu
forms, where the two may have represented different semantics, and
yet one was lost in Biblical Hebrew.  This makes it appear that Biblical
Hebrew is ambiguous as to the nature of "yiqtol" but the truth is that
the original vocalization was not ambiguous.  It is only that these are
texts in a much earlier stage of the language (when it was still spoken)
and yet Biblical Hebrew itself is a later development dating after Hebrew
ceased to be spoken in the first few centuries CE, and that lost those
distinctions.  If a Massorete was to write a text in Biblical Hebrew as
he understood it, there would not be this ambiguity.

Yitzhak Sapir