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  • From: Rolf Furuli <furuli AT online.no>
  • To: b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] How does biblical Hebrew describe a present event? (was Survey)
  • Date: Wed, 17 Jun 2009 17:07:05 +0200

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




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