Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Rolf Furuli" <furuli AT online.no>]

Dear Peter,

Please see my comments below.

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Peter Kirk" <peter AT qaya.org>
To: "Rolf Furuli" <furuli AT online.no>
Cc: <b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org>
Sent: Wednesday, March 07, 2007 4:18 PM
Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] Verbal Aspect (was Tenses - Deut 6:4)


snip

. And
> we know that there were significant changes in the Hebrew verb system 
> during this period. So, even if there was a clean and clearly defined 
> verbal system at every one point on the diachronic scale, and 
> instantaneous transitions from one system to another, we would not expect 
> to see this clean system clearly reflected in the actual texts which we 
> have.

To say that "we know that there were significant changes in the Hebrew verb 
system " is a very strong statement. I have carefully analysed the verbs of 
the Tanakh by relevant diachronic methods, and on the basis of the 
statistics of the use of verbs, studies of the context, and discourse 
analysis I see absolutely no example that the *meaning* of any verb form has 
changed, and I see no evidence of a grammaticlizing process in the verb 
system. There is some more use of participles together with finite verbs in 
the younger books, but still no meaning change. I would like to stress that 
I also have studied the claims of change of meaning, such as the claimed 
occurrence of short preterits in old Psalms. Circular reasoning is behind 
many of these claims. The last year I have worked a lot with Ugaritic texts, 
teaching them in the classroom and translating them. Interestingly, the 
evidence for a short preterit YAQTUL in contrast with a longer YAQTULU is 
absent. To the contrary!  First, it is extremely difficult to distinguish 
morphologically between YAQTUL and YAQTULU (we need a final aleph+vowel in 
the verb for this). and second,  in the cases where a distinction is 
claimed, both forms (if there are two forms) are used both with past and 
future reference. Therefore I so often ask for crieria and controls and not 
just theoretical claims.

Best regards,

Rolf Furuli
University of Oslo


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