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b-hebrew - Re: [b-hebrew] Verbal Aspect (was Tenses - Deut 6:4)

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  • From: Peter Kirk <peter AT qaya.org>
  • To: David Kummerow <farmerjoeblo AT hotmail.com>
  • Cc: b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] Verbal Aspect (was Tenses - Deut 6:4)
  • Date: Thu, 08 Mar 2007 23:33:07 +0000

On 08/03/2007 23:10, David Kummerow wrote:
Hi Karl,

I agree.

The point I wished to make was simply that there are exceptions for the aspect-only view to deal with. You have conceded this, I think. Similarly, there are exceptions for the tense-only view to deal with. If this is the scenario, could it be that BH does note COMPLETELY grammaticalise either? That is, is it possible for BH to be on the way to grammaticalising tense? Hence all the debate where both sides have latched onto part of the picture but perhaps not the entire picture? I prefer to see the language as tense-prominent rather than tense-only or aspect-only.

It strikes me that there are very good reasons for a language to be, and remain fairly stably, in some mixture of tense-prominent and aspect-prominent. Efficient human communication needs to specify both tense and aspect, but certain combinations of these are more common than others. One strategy which some languages use, like Russian, and to a large extent Greek and English, is to have separate mechanisms for indicating tense and indicating aspect, allowing for a two-dimensional set of verb forms. But in Hebrew and other Semitic languages there are not two separate morphological or syntactic ways of distinguishing tense and aspect, and so the limited number of possible variations are distributed across the common combinations of tense and aspect, in a way which is not as neat and logical as the Russian system, or for that matter the English one. But the system does seem to work, although there does seem to have been a slow long term shift from what may well have been an originally completely aspectual system to the completely tense-based system of later Hebrew.

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





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