Biblical Hebrew Forum

[fred burlingame <tensorpath AT gmail.com>]

Hello Paul:

Thanks for your helpful comments.

It sounds to me like the "conversation" or "discourse" or "context"
surrounding the verb, dictates the tense and aspect of the verb. And that
sounds reasonable.

But ..... if so, why the existence; why the need; for two large and
different sets of verb forms:

a. yiqtol; and

b. qatal.

Somehow, I cannot believe that level of redundancy or inefficiency became
injected into the hebrew language.

regards,

fred burlingame

On Sun, Jan 30, 2011 at 7:04 AM, Paul Zellmer <pzellmer AT sc.rr.com> wrote:

> Fred,
>
> I accidentally permanently deleted your last response.  But you were asking
> about the yiqtol (actually X-yiqtol, which indicates that the verb is not
> the first element of the clause) as compared to the weqatal occurring later
> in Deut 2:25 and which happened to enjoy the same remaining root letters as
> was found in the yiqtol.
>
> Realize that, although both occur in the same verse by the modern
> enumeration, the verbs occur in two different statements.  We do not have
> here a straight narrative, rather, the verse is part of an embedded
> discourse.  And discourse in any language is normally made of short clauses
> or groups of clauses.  The second statement starts with שמעך--he hears (of)
> you and continues with two weqatals.  The three verbs make a group of
> actions that are related to each other and says nothing about their relative
> timing of occurrence.  The only way we know that the actions are future is
> from the context surrounding the group, which happens to be predictive.  It
> is this predictive quality that was marked by the X-yiqtol, the form of the
> first verb in your question.
>
> This is probably as clear as mud to you.  You really need to do some
> research in discourse analysis to find out why these forms were purposeful
> selections.  I already referred you to Bryan Rocine's grammar.
>
> Paul Zellmer
>
>