Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Rolf Furuli <furuli AT online.no>]

Dear Randall

RF:

Many thanks for giving us a glimpse of the oral approach of BH 
learning. As in all other cases this approach evidently has some 
advantages and some disadvantages. So it is important to realize what 
the method can and cannot achieve. And in connection with that, it is 
important to always keep in mind the assumptions used, and that a 
change of assumptions/conditions can give different results. For 
example, you use the grid of a), b), and c) below where b) is "not in 
poetry". If you change this condition, and at least use all the 
places in poetry where a present reference is clear, your results 
would be very different.

RB:
> 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.

RF: I agree with your last statement about grammar. The same is true 
with lexical meaning, which is not found in lexicons but in the minds 
of native speakers.

RB:

> 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.]


I have the following comments to your conclusions above:

In 1982 Leslie McFall published the book, "The Enigma of the Hebrew 
Verbal System". At the end of the book he shows how the Revised 
Standard version ( a rather literal version) translates the different 
Hebrew finite verb forms into English. The following percentages of 
the Hebrew finite forms rendered with English Present are given:

YIQTOL 3,376     23.6%
WAYYIQTOL: 308    2%
QATAL: 2,454      17.7%
WEQATAL: 545    8.5 %

We do not learn the meaning of the Hebrew verb forms by the help of 
an English translation. But the high number of QATALs and YIQTOLs 
viewed by the translators as having present reference, contradicts 
the view that the participle is the default form for present events.

During a period of ten years I analyzed all the about 80,000 finite 
and infinite verbs in the Tanakh, the DSS, Ben Sira, and the 
Inscriptions. The temporal analysis was based on the relationship 
between the deictic center (C) and refrence time RT. When RT is 
before C, the event has past reference, when it coincides with C, the 
reference was present, and when RT comes after C, the reference is 
future. I do not speak of tense, only of temporal reference, because 
I find that BH has no tenses at all.  I found the following verbs 
with present reference:

YIQTOL 2,462     18.1%
WAYYIQTOL:  420   2.9%
QATAL: 2,505    18%
WEQATAL: 240   3.9 %

In the study of McFall the participles are not systematically 
discussed. In my study I found that 5,315 participles (66% of all) 
are used similarly to finite verbs. I found the following temporal 
references of these participles (in parantheses the numbers of Active 
"A" and passive "P" participles)

Present ref: 2,200  41% (P 221, A: 1979)
Present completed ref: 511  9.6% (P 299, A 212)
Past ref: 1,997     37.5% ( 339, A 1,658)
Pre-past ref: 106   2% (P 25, A 81)
Future ref:  754   14% (P 97, A 657)

In my view the different temporal references of the participles 
indicate that the oral approach of learning BH can achieve very 
little as far as the meaning of the verbs are concerned. If the test 
you describe above, which found that the present participle is the 
default form in ongoing situations or states, is correct, these 
results does not tell us anything about the 1,997 examples with past 
reference. And neither does this method tell anything about the 2,454 
QATALs  and 3,376 YIQTOLs with present reference. So it seems to me 
that the oral method is nothing but scraping on the surface of the BH 
verbal system.

In my dissertation I found the temporal reference of all the verbs in 
Classical Hebrew, their modality, and to a great extent their place 
and role in the sentences. On this basis I have the best basis for 
drawing conclusions as to the meaning of BH verbs.





snip


> --
> Randall Buth, PhD
> www.biblicalulpan.org
> randallbuth AT gmail.com
> Biblical Language Center
> Learn Easily - Progress Further - Remember for Life
> _______________________________________________


Best regards,

Rolf Furuli
University of Oslo