Biblical Hebrew Forum

[James Christian <jc.bhebrew AT googlemail.com>]

Hi David,

but as you yourself said 'the forms are identical'. We call it a subjunctive
when we have certain pragmatic clues (e.g. clause starts with 'if') and when
the forms are used with a 'past' function we call them 'past simple'. And
yet there are no different forms to analyse. Other than contextual clues
they are completely identical and so we have to analyse the form rather than
our perceptions of its uses. When analysing the form using Rolf's method we
see that neither tense nor aspect are grammaticalised in the form. In the
same way when analysing the forms in the Hebrew text Rolf sees that neither
tense nor aspect (standard definition) are grammaticalised in the verb
forms. Exactly the same as we see in English. The different usages can
cancel the standard tense and the aspect. The benefit we have in analysing
English is that we can also analyse our perceptions of different uses. This
becomes difficult in Hebrew not being able to ask Moses what his perception
of the use of each verb occurrence was. There may well have been different
uses of the verb forms just as there are in English. Discovering the
uncancellable meaning of the verb forms gives us little in determining the
best translation for each occurrence of the verb form as the pragmatic
factors are likely to dominate in questions of translation just like the
examples I gave of translating English.

I find it useful to compare with a translation task from one modern language
to another modern language because unlike translating to and from Hebrew we
can ask bilingual informants to grade our translations.

James Christian

2010/1/31 <dwashbur AT nyx.net>

> A few comments:
>
> On 31 Jan 2010 at 19:00, James Christian wrote:
>
> > But surely you can see that the examples of the various uses of
> > 'went' show
> > that neither tense nor aspect is uncancellable.
> >
> > (1) Yesterday I went to the shop to buy a sandwich
> >
> > This use shows past tense and perfective aspect
>
> > (2) Sally went to the shop every day of her life
> >
> > This use is both referring to the past and is imperfective in aspect
> > (action
> > was repeated)
> >
> > (3) As I went to the shop I saw a man talking to a woman
> >
> > This use is referring to the past and is imperfective in aspect
> > (action is
> > ongoing). We can substitute 'went' with 'was going' with very
> > little
> > difference to the logical inferences the utterance stimulates.
>
> These are all clearly past tense.  If you want to make your case as I
> understand it,  you
> need to come up with an example that isn't.  I haven't seen one so far.
>
> > (4) If I went to the shop I would buy an ice-cream
> >
> > This use is referring to hypothetical event in the future with
> > perfective
> > aspect
> >
> > (5) If I went to the shop every day like Sally does I'd soon get
> > bored of
> > going to the shop
> >
> > This use is referring to hypothetical events both past, present and
> > future
> > that are repeated i.e. imperfective in aspect. If we changed this
> > conditional into logical inferences that could be made when its
> > truth
> > conditions are satisfied one of the inferences we could make is 'I
> > go to the
> > shop every day like Sally.' i.e. verb form becomes present simple
> > (expressing repeated actions in past, present and future; aspect
> > is
> > therefore imperfective.
>
> These are both subjunctive,  which in English is actually a distinct
> grammatical function
> although it uses an identical form.  So these examples don't really do
> anything for your case
> as technically they are something different from simple past forms.
>
> > And so we can conclude that neither tense nor aspect is
> > grammaticalised in
> > the English 'simple past' verb forms.
>
> Aspect, perhaps not (I won't comment at this point).  But you have not
> shown that the
> "simple past" form of English doesn't grammaticalize tense.  All the
> examples you gave are
> in fact past tense, and your two other examples are subjunctive form, not
> past.  So this does
> not make your case.
>
> Since I don't know Italian, I won't comment on those, either.
>
> [snip]
> Dave Washburn
>
> http://www.nyx.net/~dwashbur
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