Skip to Content.
Sympa Menu

b-hebrew - Re: [b-hebrew] Uncancelable meaning was Re: how scholars debate controversial issues

b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org

Subject: Biblical Hebrew Forum

List archive

Chronological Thread  
  • From: Peter Kirk <peter AT qaya.org>
  • To: bill.rea AT canterbury.ac.nz
  • Cc: b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] Uncancelable meaning was Re: how scholars debate controversial issues
  • Date: Wed, 28 Mar 2007 22:21:26 +0100

On 28/03/2007 21:43, Bill Rea wrote:
...
For example ``Even one of their own prophets has said, "Cretans are always
liars, evil brutes, lazy gluttons."'' No one, except philosophers, gets
stuck in an infinite loop trying to figure whether all Cretans are
liars. Everyone recognises that it is hyperbole.

A better example I was looking at today from the same set of source books: "whoever is least among you all is the greatest" (Luke 9:48). If "least" and "greatest" have any semantic meanings, they are entirely opposite and incompatible, but this did not stop someone from saying that both of these describe the same people.

So in a rather ironic twist I think that ``uncancelable'' is
being used in just such a non-standard way so that those who
are arguing against uncancelability aren't allowing the word
to take on a new meaning. :-)

OK, let's see what happens if we go with a new definition of "uncancellable" something like "only occasionally cancellable", or "only cancellable when used in unusual environments". If we apply that kind of rule to Hebrew verbs, we may well end up with rather different results to those that Rolf has put forward, such as that WAYYIQTOL is an "uncancellable" narrative past tense, except when used uncharacteristically outside narrative and/or in a future context.
Having watched the debate for the ten years or so that it has been
going on I've almost always found the counter-examples to be highly
contrived or of the special usage type. ...

Well, possibly. But the fact that even contrived sentences can cancel the alleged rules proves that the rules are not truly uncancellable. As for "special usage", that is a nice maxim which allows "uncancellable" to lose all its meaning, because there is no definition of "special usage" or way of recognising it except that the "uncancellable" rule has been cancelled. The problem is that real language, especially in more colloquial varieties, is full of what might be called "special usages" which have various kinds of grammatical or semantic irregularities. So we end up with a set of rules which are uncancellable only in an artificially and arbitrarily restricted subset of a real language, but are not really uncancellable in the language as it is spoken.

... Lets take an example:-

Q: Are you going to the Lantern Festival tomorrow night?
A: I was going tomorrow, but something has come up.

Is the ``was'' really a future reference? I don't think so.

I agree. But many of Rolf's claimed examples of for example WAYYIQTOL with future reference are just this kind of special usage, such as a short narration of future events being told from a deictic centre further in the future.

--
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