Biblical Hebrew Forum

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

Dear Peter,

The question under discussion was whether we can distinguish between 
WAYYIQTOLs and WEYIQTOLs in unpointed texts. The answer is No! I have only a 
part of my data base where I am at present, but I quick look  at what I 
have, revealed that 90.5 % of 3.p.s.m. WEYIQTOLs of lamed he verbs were 
apocopated. While jussive forms may be apocopated, that is not always the 
case. I analyse 5,117 YIQTOLs as modal, yet I found only 298 apocopated 
forms of these. Many occur after the negativeparticle )L. Of 598 exmples of 
YIQTOLs preceded by )L, I found 123 apocopated forms and 30 long forms of 
those verbs that could be apocopated. You should not be too quick to give 
your interpretation when you see verb statistics. While quantity comparisons 
are important, quality assessments are even more important. To do that you 
need to work with the text from which the statitics is taken, using 
discourse analysis, looking for word order, modality, stress patterns, 
suffixes, and peculiarities of each root. Without this your interpretation 
cannot bebalanced.

Best regards,

Rolf Furuli
University of Oslo


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Peter Kirk" <peter AT qaya.org>
To: "Rolf Furuli" <furuli AT online.no>
Cc: <b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org>
Sent: Saturday, March 10, 2007 11:02 AM
Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] Verbal Aspect (was Tenses - Deut 6:4)


> On 10/03/2007 08:31, Rolf Furuli wrote:
> > Dear Peter,
> >
> >
> > Of the lamed he group in the Tanakh the WAYYIQTOLs 98 (4.7 %) og the 
> > verbs that could
> > have been apocopated have long forms. For the Hiphil group the number is
> > 133 (15.5 %), and for the hollow group the number is 185 (30.7 %). In the 
> > Samaritan Pentateuch 39 (14.7 %) lamed he verbs are not apocopated. The 
> > ratio apocopated/nonapocopated forms in the different books of the Tanakh 
> > varies much. Apocopation is connected with person and verb root. For 
> > example, of 1.p.s. WAYYIQTOLs that could have been apocopated, only 66.9 
> > % are long, of 3.p.pl.m. 75 % are long, but of 3.p.m.s. only 1.3 % are 
> > apocopated. These factors suggest that there are pragmatic reasons behind 
> > apocopation rather than semantic ones
> I don't agree with your conclusion. First, let's concentrate on the 
> lamed-he verbs, as the hiphil and hollow verbs are affected by the rule 
> "there is no consistency in plene and defective writing" which applies to 
> the Tanakh as well as DSS. And then I would want to limit the discussion 
> to third person verbs, because it is well known that in the first person 
> there is a tendency even in jussive (cohortative) forms to add an extra 
> he, and this extra he cannot be distinguished (certainly in consonantal 
> writing) from the final he of a non-apocopated form. Also, surely we need 
> to look at 3rd person singular, because in the plural of lamed he verbs 
> there is no possibility of apocopation.
>
> So we are left with your statistic that of 3rd person singular WAYYIQTOL 
> forms of lamed-he verbs, only 1.3% are not apocopated. This in itself is 
> enough to distinguish WAYYIQTOL from the simple conjunction plus 
> non-jussive YIQTOL, in the consonantal text, for it is well known that 
> non-jussive YIQTOL is rarely apocopated.
>
> Do you have a directly corresponding statistic for WEYIQTOL forms? I 
> accept that there are a number of apocopated WEYIQTOLs which have jussive 
> force, for example WIYHIY which is quite common as a jussive "and let 
> there be" e.g. in Genesis 1:6. But what proportion of non-jussive 
> WEYIQTOLs of lamed-he verbs, 3rd person singular, are apocopated? I 
> suspect that it will be much less than the 98.7% for WAYYIQTOLs, a 
> significant difference in the consonantal text which implies a 
> pre-Masoretic distinction between narrative WAYYIQTOL and a simple 
> conjunction plus non-jussive YIQTOL.
>
> --
> Peter Kirk
> E-mail:  peter AT qaya.org
> Blog:    http://www.qaya.org/blog/
> Website: http://www.qaya.org/