Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Nir cohen - Prof. Mat." <nir AT ccet.ufrn.br>]

dear rolf, paul, fred, arnaud,

i agree with arnaud. the idea of aspect is most interesting. however, looking
at any 
chapter of the tanakh, it shows NO correlation WHATEVER with the distribution
of the 
two forms, qatal and wayiqtol, 

                      WITHIN A GIVEN SENTENCE!!! 

(not in the entire text). there must be a much simpler technical explanation
here. 
here it comes, fred!

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let us just consider sentences which are not compound, with time, tense,
aspect all being equal, 
namely, past. also, with just two actions, clearly in the past. we have
thousands of such 
sentences in the torah. maybe pere's chapter 2sam 17 can be used here. 

FACT 1: each half of the sentence may start with a verb or non-verb.

FACT 2: each sentence (whenever possible) starts with a w-. this is the
standasrd past narrative 
form of BH. let us restrict our attention to such sentences.

COROLLARY 3: the verb is wayqtol if it comes first (following the w-), qatal
otherwise (not following w-).
 
HYPOTHESIS 4: each of the forms (qatal, yqtol) cannot occur twice in the same
sentence. (this is what i 
described as poetic style).

   hypothesis 4 works well in practice, although it should be ammended in some
cases. one case is analyzed below.

COROLLARY 5: each sentence of the type described above should be of one of the
following two forms:

CASE 1) first half starts with a verb, second half .... not. 
        first verb is wyqtol, second verb is qatal (or other forms such as
infinitive).

CASE 2) first half does not start with a verb, second half .....yes. 
        first verb is qatal, second is wayqtol.

so we see that in most cases the SVO and VSO order of the second half will be
dependent, via inversion, 
on the first half. some cases where hypothesis 4 is violated may be attributed
to difficulties in
maintaining this inversion in the narrative.

the only enigma left is to understand how the word order of the first half is
chosen. this issue
mixes both grammar and context, and would be beyond my capacity to describe 
here.

i believe that this simple mechanical explanation fits the text much better
than the aspect 
assumption, in the sense i specified, i.e. WITHIN EACH ISOLATED, SIMPLE
SENTENCE. clearly, in more 
complicated sentences, where aspect, tense and time may diverge, the more
complicated grammatical
theories may be helpful.

nir cohen