Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Peter Kirk <peter AT qaya.org>]

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/