Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Arnaud Fournet" <fournet.arnaud AT wanadoo.fr>]

Karl:

> This is especially true with Hebrew where there is historical record that
> people used to believe that the different declensions had time related
> meanings, just like in Indo-European languages. Among the “first year 
>  lies”
> I was taught was that Biblical Hebrew declensions referred to time—tense
> and/or aspect. Therefore, were I to read something by an author talking
> about tense or aspect as pertains to Biblical Hebrew verbs, I would have
> real difficulties accepting that he knew more than very basic knowledge of
> Biblical Hebrew language, and that not accurate.
***

I suppose you mean "conjugation" !?
I would rather apply "declension" to nominal stems rather than verbal ones.

There are very clear signs that Indo-European languages originate in a 
language which had aspect and not tense as groundwork.
The aspect distinguished between on-going process and complete process 
without reference to past or present.
A typical consequence of that is that one can find the following kind of 
lexical pairs:
PIE *seikw "to flow" (as of liquids)
Latin, derived from this root, siccus "dry".
It's not a contradiction that "dry" is derived from "to flow".
to flow: on-going process
dry: completed process: no longer flowing; hence dried up.
Other "contradictory" pairs are for example, blank "currently burning and 
emitting light" and black "no longer burning and emitting light".
There are plenty of examples.

I'm not aware that Semitic or Hebrew displays that kind of phenomenon.
So I would definitely conclude that Semitic and Hebrew had or have a *tense* 
system.

It's possible that in addition to tense, Hebrew had a touch of aspect, as in 
French or English.
But it definitely looks like tense is the groundwork.

Arnaud Fournet