Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Peter Kirk <peter AT qaya.org>]

On 07/03/2007 14:52, Rolf Furuli wrote:

> ... This is what all linguists know 
> and ordinary persons understand (but they do not describe it by the help of 
> grammatical terminology): The past reference of some English verbs is 
> sometimes connected with the verb form, in other cases it is dependent on 
> the context. As linguists we must be ready to show why we say that "walked" 
> has an intrinsic past tense while that is not the case with "walking".
>
>   
Rolf, I accept that this is in general true of these examples in 
English, although even so the tense is not completely uncancellable as I 
showed a few days ago. I do not accept that that implies that the same 
is necessarily true of all verb form distinctions in all languages at 
all stages of their diachronic development. After all, if there is any 
truth in the theory that Hebrew (and Arabic) changed from an aspectual 
system to a tense-based one, there must have been at least a short 
period during which mother tongue speakers were uncertain or had 
different opinions about whether certain distinctions were ones of tense 
or aspect. And there is no compelling reason why such a situation might 
not continue for a long period.

--
Peter Kirk
E-mail:  peter AT qaya.org
Blog:    http://www.qaya.org/blog/
Website: http://www.qaya.org/