Biblical Hebrew Forum

[K Randolph <kwrandolph AT gmail.com>]

Chavoux:

On Mon, Jan 24, 2011 at 7:00 AM, Chavoux Luyt <chavoux AT gmail.com> wrote:

> Shalom the list!
>
> Has anybody read the article "The General/Gnomic Usage of  Hebrew
> Morphologies in the Book of Isaiah."
> by ANDREW BOWLING,  Graduate Institute of Applied Linguistic in
> GIALens.  (2007)?
>

Is it available online?

>
> I am not sure if I understand him correctly, but he seems to imply
> that the qtl and yqtl forms of the Hebrew verb has less of a time
> meaning than I always understood. Is it possible that they could
> indicate relative time (i.e. yqtl happens after qtl, but not
> necessarily in the future when seen from the present)? I must confess
> that I have not read all the examples in the Hebrew yet, so I don't
> know whether he considers the waw consecutive.
>
> Any comments?
>
> Regards
> Chavoux Luyt
>
> There was a discussion on this a short while ago.

Diethelm Michel and I both came to conclusions that the Qatal and Yiqtol do
not encode for time at all. Rather they both refer to other considerations.
(Each of us came to our conclusions independently of the other.)

Many believe that the Qatal and Yiqtol refer to aspect, in particular the
perfective and imperfective aspects.

There are still people who teach that they refer to tense, in the same
manner as modern Hebrew and Indo-European languages.

I hope this helps.

Karl W. Randolph.