Biblical Hebrew Forum

[dwashbur AT nyx.net]

No, I'm not imagining any such thing.  However, if we're going to try and 
categorize 
homonymous forms in a slumgullian language like English, we have to think 
diachronically 
as well as synchronically.  I don't see your approach  doing this.

However, since we're talking about English and this list is about Hebrew, we 
probably 
should desist now...

On 31 Jan 2010 at 20:32, James Christian wrote:

> 
> 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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> 
> 
> 


Dave Washburn

http://www.nyx.net/~dwashbur