Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Randall Buth <randallbuth AT gmail.com>]

<donaldrvance AT mac.com> wrote:
> To be fair, I don't think I've heard "suffix tense." Rather I have heard 
> suffix conjugation and prefix conjugatio, both of which are neutral as to 
> function.

You are correct, Donald, though I think I remember Sperber's grammar
using this way back when. 'tense' in this sense is usually used when
referring to both of the conjugations together, where someone might
say "the Hebrew tenses do not mark time". Or "the Hebrew tenses divide
into preformative and afformative". Or even things like 'Imperfect
tense' and 'perfect tense', etc. (Cf. Gesenius 40a: "the verb has only
two tense-forms [Perfect and Imperfect]") I've heard the same in
Greek, especially by those following Porter's timeless 'Greek tenses',
though they acknowledge they only use 'tense' as a convention to refer
to semantic verbal categories, or will refer to the "present" aspect,
etc. Even in traditional Greek books one hears that in the
non-indicatives the tenses [sic] have no time. All of this needs to be
taken with several grains of salt, though I have my doubts if it will
ever clean up in English, unless everyone becomes a 'logical
linguist'.

In Hebrew I either use traditional terms like he`atid and he`avar, or
the formal names qatal/yiqtol/vayyiqtol/ve-qatal. The
qatal/yiqtol/vayyiqtol/ve-qatal are the easiest since they already
have the sequential names. One thing I don't do is say "`atid
mehuppax" for vayyiqtol (if not an oxymoron, at least psychologically
distracting for learners and not the way it is/needs-to-be wired in
the brain) but I would say vav ha-hippux le`avar for vayyiqtol if
describing in traditional terms. Anson Rainey rightly hates vav
ha-hippux, but such is the language tradition.
It is usually pretty easy to follow what someone is referring to but I
find 'waw consecutive imperfect' unacceptable, since I don't know if
the person is referring to veqatal (a sequential named semantically as
'imperfect') or vayyiqtol (referring to the form yiqtol by a semantic
name). nim'as li.

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