Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Randall Buth <randallbuth AT gmail.com>]

>The characteristics of a language that lacks tense, is that all its
finite verb forms in normal clauses (not hypothetical clauses) can be
used for past, present, and future. This is true in Classical Hebrew,
but not in Classical Greek, English, and Norwegian.>

yet it remains enigmatic that BH theories that say that
"adverbs mark time, verbs are used irrespective of the time divisions"
the following is not predicted:

vayyiqtol is never used in clauses with maHar 'tomorrow'
nor does one ever find ... maHar QATAL

but one does find veQATAL maHar
              ve Sub Qotel maHar
   and     ... yiqtol maHar.

Rolf may predict that if we had more than 52 occurrences of this in BH
we would find examples.
We might, but I doubt it.
I note that 52 out of 52 seem to show that the verb has a component
in it that correlates with time when it is not called on to do something else,
and when the clause specifies  'tomorrow' it is not being called on for
something else.
(But I don't think of the BH verb as purely 'time' or 'aspect' or
'mood', they may
point to any of the three. This is the kind of thing that one sees in 
minimally
differentiated languages with two-way verbal morphology as Derek Bickerton
has noted in studying creoles.)

Randall Buth


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