Biblical Hebrew Forum

[David Kummerow <farmerjoeblo AT hotmail.com>]

> I will continue with )MR in my next E-mail.

Hi Rolf,

Great -- because although your email is very long, you never got down to 
dealing with the actual question posed, viz. that the first verb of Gen 
12:1 can be construed imperfectively.

> Ignoring the points above, DK takes one root, )MR, and asks for one
> example where we can see that this verb is imperfective and has
> cancellable properties.

Actually, I would prefer to be shown how 'mr in wayyiqtol conjugation is 
consistently imperfectively throughout the corpus, like what I was 
asking in the first place. Gen 12:1 simply arose because James wanted me 
to conduct a test on part of the corpus myself. I though, well why not 
Gen 12-15? And I floundered on the first verb. Of course, I know that in 
your opinion there are only a small number of verbs in the corpus which 
allow for seeing the uncancellable meaning. But like I said in my 
review, I think this is quite doubtful given the evidence brought 
forward in the linguistic literature concerning token frequency etc. and 
the fact that uncancellable meaning as a linguistic principal is 
entirely questionable. In any case, even in knowing what you wrote, I 
still fail to see how wayyo'mer of Gen 12:1 can refer to anything other 
than a past perfective speech act.

Regards,
David Kummerow.