Biblical Hebrew Forum

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

I think the problem here is that you are imagining English as a dead
language with no informants. If we were to analyse a corpus of English as a
dead language with no informants then we would come to the conclusion that
neither tense nor aspect is grammaticalised in the verb form. The fact that
we analyse the modern language as informants and can categorise the homonyms
shows that our perceptions treat the usages so differently that we feel fine
saying that they are different words. Perhaps we could argue the case that
this was so if it were 1 verb out of a million where we saw this phenomenon.
But we don't. We see it consistently with all verbs. We are clearly seeing a
number of distinct functions mapping onto the same form. When we are faced
with the task of translation it is the function rather than the form which
dominates whether a translation will be high quality or sub-standard.

In a round about kind of way I could agree with your analysis of calling the
different uses of past inflected English verb forms as homonyms but then
that would only inspire the question 'So, how do we know how many homonyms
the B-Hebrew verb forms represent' and so we eventually get back to the same
problem whether we analyse the different uses as homonyms or not. That is to
say the problem of mapping the form onto its function and therefore how to
best go about choosing the most natural translation in a target language.

James Christian

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

>
>
> On 31 Jan 2010 at 19:59, James Christian wrote:
>
> >
> > 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.
>
> Not at all.  We understand that they are homonyms.  In English the two
> forms melded into a
> single visual/auditory string; the qualifier "if" is our cue that we have
> one homonym and not
> the other.  They are not the same "word" (however that term is defined)
> distinguished only
> by "certain pragmatic clues."  I agree that BH didn't grammaticalize either
> tense or aspect (I
> extend this to the notion of "sequence," but that's another topic) but you
> have not shown this
> for English.  That's my only quibble.
>
> Dave Washburn
>
> http://www.nyx.net/~dwashbur
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