Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Peter Kirk <peter AT qaya.org>]

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/