Biblical Hebrew Forum

[David Kummerow <farmerjoeblo AT hotmail.com>]

Hi Randall,

You get no disagreement from me as I think you are correct in your 
contention that the participle is the prototypical way of referring to 
the present in direct speech in BH. The number of features in the 
language which point to a grammaticalization of aspect to tense lead me 
to say that the verbal system is tense-prominent rather than 
aspect-prominent, though the shift has not completely occurred. (As you 
show in your Living Biblical Hebrew for Everyone, there are some 
aspectual occurrences which cannot be taken as indicating tense.)

Regards,
David Kummerow.

> After another set of six comments, it is probably useful to re-orient
> back to the original issue. None of the comments proposed
> a YIQTOL example in an actual, positive, real, present reference,
> (yes, given a strict set of parameters to insure that we are
> comparing a few apples to a few apples)
> though one comment assured that such was 'accurate', and another
> seemed to imply that the vayyiqtol was effictively a present tense. If the
> latter, then one wonders what distinguishes vayyiqtol +Subject from
> ve-Subject+qotel, or even ve-qotel Subject? But that would need to
> be a different thread.
>
> Let's keep looking for some bonafide examples
> of present yiqtol without outside contingencies. The kind that
> Hebrew profs keep giving me like:
>
> * er'e et ha-`ets sham  *"I see the tree there"
>
> Again, look at this the other way around:
> What if I had a class and was saying to a standing student
>
> * ta`amod sham vaani e`mod po
> as if to say  * "you're standing there and I'm standing here"
>
> I would have hoped that people would have jumped all over me and
> said
>  'show us some good examples for the kind of Hebrew you're teaching!'
> (they sure do that fast when they hear participles !
> "I get slandered, libeled, I hear words I never heard in the Bible")
>
> Instead, it may be that people are looking from a 'leaning tower of pisa'
> so that if I would lean with them they would say
> 'you're standing straight'.
>
> But I'm sensitive to gravity and want to stand straight.
>
> blessings
> Randall Buth