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  • From: "Paul Zellmer" <pzellmer AT sc.rr.com>
  • To: "'fred burlingame'" <tensorpath AT gmail.com>
  • Cc: b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] language level
  • Date: Mon, 31 Jan 2011 07:26:02 -0500

You have been pointed to the field of study that answers your question.
Please check it out. You may not agree with its conclusions, but at least
you will not be asking the same question over and over again.



Oh, and for a dissenting view discussed ad nauseum, you might check the
archives for Rolf Furuli’s posts when he was actively developing his analysis
of the wayyiqtol-weyiqtol in the Tanach.



Paul Zellmer



From: fred burlingame [mailto:tensorpath AT gmail.com]
Sent: Sunday, January 30, 2011 12:07 PM
To: Paul Zellmer
Cc: b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org
Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] language level



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







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