Skip to Content.
Sympa Menu

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

b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org

Subject: Biblical Hebrew Forum

List archive

Chronological Thread  
  • From: Peter Kirk <peter AT qaya.org>
  • To: Rolf Furuli <furuli AT online.no>
  • Cc: b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] Verbal Aspect (was Tenses - Deut 6:4)
  • Date: Sat, 10 Mar 2007 16:51:23 +0000

On 10/03/2007 13:04, Rolf Furuli wrote:
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. ...

OK. How many of these WEYIQTOLs are jussive? What is the percentage of those which are not jussive? Even 90.5% is statistically significantly different from 98.7%. Actually I would dispute these figures based on the ones I find below (which combine masculine and feminine) which suggest more like 50% of forms which can be apocopated (63 apocopated, 57 not 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. ...

Out of how many which could be apocopated? On what basis did you analyse some YIQTOLs as "modal"? ("You should not be too quick to give your interpretation when you see verb statistics.") How does your basis compare with the traditional understanding of "jussive", or with the "jussive" markings in the Westminster Hebrew database? It would be possible and interesting to analyse this database to find the distributions of YIQTOL, WEYIQTOL etc forms of lamed he verbs which are and are not apocopated. See below where I do this.

... 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. ...

This is the expected pattern in what are clearly jussive forms; it seems that rather more than 10% of jussives are not apocopated when they can be, a much higher proportion than for WAYYIQTOLs.

... 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.

I agree that these factors may also be important. However, if I see a clear correlation between Masoretic pointing as WAYYIQTOL and apocopation, even if the match is not precise, that is evidence that there is a distinction here which goes back before the Masoretes.

So, let's look at the evidence:

From a morphological tool based on the Westminster Hebrew database, I count a total of 1491 WAYYIQTOLs of all lamed-he verbs which are marked as apocopated (tags "v?w3?s?a"), and 127 which are not marked as apocopated (tags "v?w3?s"), excluding forms with suffixes. But in fact only 34 of the 127 end with a he and so are truly not apocopated. So I conclude that there are in fact 1584 apocopated and 34 non-apocopated 3rd person singular WAYYIQTOLs of lamed-he verbs, that is 2.1% non-apocopated - actually a higher figure than you gave.

For YIQTOLs of lamed-he verbs, 3rd person singular only with no suffixes, the figures are as follows:

Not apocopated, not jussive meaning: 933 (tags "v?i3?s"), of which 51 are preceded by the conjunction (tags "v?i3?s Pc")
Not apocopated, jussive meaning: 20 (tags "v?i3?s{1}Jm"), of which 6 are preceded by the conjunction (tags "v?i3?s{1}Jm Pc")
Apocopated, not jussive meaning: 20 (tags "v?i3?s?a{1}Jf"), of which 8 are preceded by the conjunction (tags "v?i3?s?a{1}Jf Pc")
Apocopated, jussive meaning: 150 (tags "v?i3?s?a{1}Jt"), of which 55 are preceded by the conjunction (tags "v?i3?s?a{1}Jt Pc")

Of all these non-jussive forms (as interpreted by the Westminster team), 20 out of 973 are apocopated, 2.1%. Of the WEYIQTOLs in this group, 8 out of 59 are apocopated, 13.6% (1 Samuel 10:5; Job 36:15; Isaiah 63:3; Lamentations 3:50; Ezekiel 14:7; Daniel 11:4; Joel 2:20; Micah 7:10). Although this shows a clear tendency for apocopation to be more common after the conjunction, this is still only a small minority of the cases. Let me summarise the results:

apoc non-apoc
WEYIQTOL 8 51
WAYYIQTOL 1584 34

Thus there is a clear and strongly statistically significant correlation between WAYYIQTOL forms (as pointed by the Masoretes) and apocopation of lamed-he verbs, if we do not include forms with jussive meaning. This is clear proof that the Masoretic pointing of WAYYIQTOL was not a Masoretic invention but goes back to the consonantal text.

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





Archive powered by MHonArc 2.6.24.

Top of Page