Biblical Hebrew Forum

[K Randolph <kwrandolph AT gmail.com>]

James:

On Mon, Feb 1, 2010 at 2:03 AM, James Christian
<jc.bhebrew AT googlemail.com>wrote:

>
> (2) John works at the factory
>
> This expresses both past, present and future.
>

No, this does not express either past nor future, merely ongoing activity.
One minute later he could be fired. English does not grammaticalize aspect.

>
> (3) And so after he went into the bar he goes up to the barman and orders a
> pint
>
> These express actions in the past.
>

Back when I attended grade school, were I to write such a sentence without
quotes around it to indicate an exact quote, including grammatical errors,
the teacher would have marked it, and reduced the score I received for the
paper. To avoid a negative result on my grade, I was taught to write the
above sentence as follows: “And so after he went into the bar, he went up to
the barman and ordered a pint.”

I was taught that in English, the proper way to indicate the subjunctive is
to use “the third person past tense”, no matter who is the subject, the
exceptions were the use of verbs that indicate the subjunctive, such as
“would” and “could have”. But such is the decrease in educational standards
that many children are no longer taught rules such as those concerning the
subjunctive and tense consistency as illustrated by the above examples.

>
> (4) And so when you come to me you can check.
>
> This expresses something that will happen in the future
>

I was taught that this is an infinitive, where the “to” is not necessary
because of the “can” immediately preceding it.

>
> Conclusion. …
>
> James Christian
>
> These are examples where a mere statistical analysis would indicate that
tense may not be grammaticalized. What is needed is to go beyond a mere
statistical analysis to look for patterns in the exceptions.

In Biblical Hebrew, the difficulties are compounded in that the vowels were
not preserved. Were there special forms in spoken Hebrew that were not
preserved in written Hebrew? We don’t know.

What we are left with is analyzing the contexts to see what are the usages
of the verbs. Are all wayyiqtols used in contexts that indicate the past
tense? That almost all narrative in Tanakh refers to events that happened in
the past, and wayyiqtol is widely used in narrative, it is therefore no
surprise that most wayyiqtols in Tanakh have a past reference. But what
about the exceptions? Do they have any patterns? If yes, what are the
patterns? Subjunctives? Something else? If no patterns, then the exceptions
can be taken as indicators that tense is not grammaticalized in Biblical
Hebrew, at least not using the wayyiqtol.

I had assumed that Rolf had done such analysis.

As for translation from a language that does not grammaticalize tense, to
one that does, one needs to analyze contexts to recognize that had that
language grammaticalized tenses, what would those tenses have been?

Karl W. Randolph.