Biblical Hebrew Forum

[fred burlingame <tensorpath AT gmail.com>]

Hello Nir:

I appreciate your frankness ....

perhaps just as humans have a tail bone and wisdom teeth, artifacts of the
past; unused in the present; so ancient hebrew has the two verb forms.

but is it true today; that when the native hebrew speaker says:

1. "steve skipped school yesterday;

2. "sally will attend school tomorrow."

the speaker always reaches today:

a. for the qatal form in statement "1," and

b. for the yiqtol form for statement "2?"

regards,

fred burlingame

On Tue, Feb 1, 2011 at 2:25 PM, Nir cohen - Prof. Mat. 
<nir AT ccet.ufrn.br>wrote:

> fred,
>
> *On Tue, 1 Feb 2011 00:37:11 -0600, fred burlingame wrote*
> > If only you could give as simple and reasonable an explanation for the
> reason for the existence of yiqtol and qatal verb forms in the masoretic
> text ... :)
>
> if your question is: "why they choose this form here and that form there",
> the answer is:
>
> i dont know since both forms look identical (etymologically) to me, unlike
> piel and paal.
> probably they looked identical even at the time, so both were used
> interchangeably.
>
> *is your question is  "why are there two forms of future in BH
> and related dialects like moabite, to begin with"?  the answer is:
>
> i dont know. i can provide two speculations:
>
> 1) two distinct forms at some very ancient time which by the 1st millenium
> bc became completely
> synonymous and interchangeable. then later on the more cumbersome form in
> each pair disappeared
> through redundancy.
>
> 2) the WAYQTOL and WEQATAL forms were invented expressly for poetical
> reasons, based on the QATAL
> and YQTOL form. when people becams too sad to write poems, these new forms
> were abandoned.
>
> as the physicists say, the past is as difficult to fathom as the future.
>
> nir cohen
>
>
> *
>