Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Randall Buth <randallbuth AT gmail.com>]

One of the good things about oral=-aural pedagogy is that it forces
teachers to look at the language from a different perspective, and in
so doing they often discover areas where they were misconstruing
or misapplying their perceived 'grammatical' position.

vayyixtov Shulman
> The present tense is virtually non-existent. In fact I doubt you can find a
single instance of it.>

I am not sure what Moshe is referring to, but he has pointed
to a spot where fully-trained biblical PhDs intuitively
mis-apply the 'grammar gridwork' that is in their head.

By the way, all language and grammar ultimately exists in people's heads,
There are maybe close to a billion copies of English currently being carried
around on the planet, and no one of them is exactly the same.

Coming to BH:

If a person was working on something and someone asked what the person
was doing, or where they were standing, or what they were seeing
would the default statement be

A.
hu bone [davar]
hu `omed [sham]
hu ro'e [et ha-`ets]

(Yes, word order may change, and in conversation certain assumed pieces
of a sentence may be dropped out.
I'm only asking about the best verb form to match the context.)

or would one say
B.
hu yivne [davar]
hu ya`amod [sham]
hu yir'e [et ha-`ets]

or
C.
hu bana [davar]
hu `amad [sham]
hu ra'a [et ha-`ets]
?

Most Hebraicists have answered "B". Rarely, C, and frequently
people have preempted an answer to say that A would not be
biblical Hebrew!

This came up in the Cohelet project (for which I was a consultant/participant
but did not control the output, I'll deal with that in a different thread.)
More than one professor in the project wanted to say "B" and claimed that
that was the truly authentic biblical Hebrew and to be used as default in a
classroom. They correctly didn't want modern Hebrew for their examples.

It took months before this was resolved. There are common problems
with the notion of 'present tense' and common prejudices that twenty years
of schooling can bring to the table.
So I asked the question in reverse.

Find five examples of YIQTOL being used in such a situation,
a. not in a question,
b. not in poetry (where time is often in the eye of the beholder),
c. not in a habitual or omnitemporal or timeless context.
Examples should be positive and refer to an actual situation that was
part of the situation of the conversation.

Not one example of YIQTOL was produced.
But there were quite a few participle constructions
attested for such situations. Yes, "A".
And 'Yes' in both First Temple Hebrew and in Second Temple Hebrew.

Why is this important? Because this is a frequent situation in a classroom
and the correct structures need to be used. If you brought Isaiah or Jeremiah
to a classroom they would say that the students kotvim 'are writing',
yoshvim 'are sitting', 'shom`im' 'are listening', or whatever else one
or another
would be doing at any one time. And they would not be speaking modern
Hebrew. Joosten was correct about this in his article in '89 (Predicative
participle) [See my article in the Verbless Clause '99 for a correction of his
word order paramater.]

If this above is correct, it is quite eyeopening for the field. It
means that the
anonymous professors answering this question over the years (and I hold
them in high respect and they represent the field) achieved PhDs and
are preparing commentaries, books, and normal scholarly output by putting
Hebrew through a mental grid that is quite different from Biblical Hebrew.
One might add that this is an excellent example of why it is good to also
be supicious of 'grammar-translation' pedagogy. Using a language often
forces a person to see what they actually think in their brain and to see
how they relate to a text. Skeletons may come out of a closet. PLease
note: it is not what someone said or produced that is decisive, but how
it compares to biblical examples. No one is claiming that a modern speaker
produces 'new evidence'. What they may produce is a new question and a
different perspective.
Also note: this is not claiming that the participle is "the present tense".
It is certainly  more than a present tense.

But it is clearly (certainly to me) the default Biblical Hebrew method of
referring to a currently on-going situation in a conversation. And it is the
correct way to refer to a student "sitting in chair", e.g. atta yoshev sham
va-ani `omedet po "you are sitting there and I am standing here".
This is biblical Hebrew, and not 'disguised modern Hebrew'.
MA ATTA OMER !! kaxa.

The above is interesting, no? And if it strikes someone at right angles,
please propose a better way for time-traveling Jeremiah to say
"you are sitting there and I am standing here" ('cepting for the change to
masculine `omed, of course.)

braxot
Randall

PS: If the above is correct, how did biblical studies train up scholars to
be consistently off-base? This is a different question, and please start
a different thread title if wanting to pursue it. My 2 cents: I think that 
many
Hebraists in the 19 century were better Arabists than Hebraists. Note
that Arabic has a compound imperfective past "kana yaktubu" using the
prefix form, while the biblical Hebrew compound imperfective past is
"haya kotev". The biblical partiple is parallel to the Arabic yiqtol. And in
colloquial Arabic speech to this day one hears hu bi-(y)iktib, where the
yiqtol is being used in actual present contexts (and with a particle
apparently coming from pre-islamic colloquial Arabic and attested in
South Arabic.) I suspect, but cannot prove, that such Arabic has
influenced their model of BH. On the other hand the 19th century was
quick to reject the ancient native informant view that the Arabic verb
included time. So they were not consciously dominated by Arabic.
Maybe this, and a couple dollars will get me a cup of coffee.

-- 
Randall Buth, PhD
www.biblicalulpan.org
randallbuth AT gmail.com
Biblical Language Center
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