Biblical Hebrew Forum

[fred burlingame <tensorpath AT gmail.com>]

Hello Chavoux:

I do appreciate your comments.

The hebrew language printed on an israeli newspaper today, looks different
to me from the hebrew language printed in the tanakh. The latter I
recognize; the former I do not.

I suppose the best way for me to understand your practical distinction
between tense and aspect, as you consume this language ... would include a
concrete example.

Take proverbs 31:15. If someone read those words to you today, without
identifying the source of the words, (other than the person speaking to
you) ... how would you "hear" the two verbs; ותקם (va-ta-kam); and ותתן
(va-ti-ten)?

a. "and she rose;" "and she gave?"

b. "and she is rising;" "and she is giving?"

c. some other manner?

And is what you "hear" first determined by your initial decision that:

a. the speaker is speaking to me in "modern" or current hebrew; or

b. the speaker is speaking to me in biblical hebrew language?

I also am grateful for your clarification of vav consecutive; as it appears
this little letter includes a multifunction prefix: (i.) change tense; and
(ii.)conjunction.

I am glad to see this discussion facilitates your understanding of the
language. It surely enhances mine.

Thanks for your help.

regards,

fred burlingame


On Thu, Feb 3, 2011 at 5:04 AM, Chavoux Luyt <chavoux AT gmail.com> wrote:

> Shalom Fred
> >
> > Message: 21
> > Date: Wed, 2 Feb 2011 10:32:16 -0600
> > From: fred burlingame <tensorpath AT gmail.com>
> <snip>
> > Females (and others) today however, seem to have a different
> interpretation
> > of these verb tenses. Rather than recounting the mother's "past" actions,
> in
> > the week preceding shabat; the ??? ??? (e-shet ha-yil) rehearses the
> > woman's actions as the "present" attributes of the mother?
> >
> >
> http://www.hillel.org/NR/rdonlyres/D8427B98-3F42-4F74-A355-AA9088FF8E15/0/eshet_chayil.pdf
> >
> >
> http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/judaica/ejud_0002_0006_0_06079.html
> >
> > Do you conclude that the formal and literal meaning of these verbs
> includes
> > past tense, the above comments notwithstanding?
>
> As I understand it, any act is either completed (perfectum - katal (&
> va-yiktol in narratives in biblical Hebrew) ) or not completed
> (imperfectum - yiktol (& va-katal in biblical Hebrew, but not usually
> in modern Hebrew)). So even a "present" act is either complete or
> incomplete  (e.g. I have heard somebody ask: "Hevanta?" (Do/did you
> understand?) instead of "Atah mevin?" and the answer: "Hevanti" (I
> understood/ I have understood), but in a situation where we would use
> present tense (I understand - "Ani mevin") in English). Because most
> past acts are complete and most future acts are incomplete, it would
> appear as if the "perfectum" corresponds to "past tense" and the
> "imperfectum" to "future tense", but the correspondence is not exact.
> Moreover, from this perspective there is no "present tense", because
> any act can be seen as either completed or incomplete. In modern
> Hebrew the "infinitive" form "po'el" is usually used for present tense
> (which was normally used in biblical Hebrew to indicate the one doing
> the act: e.g. "Oseh Shamayim v'aretz" = Maker of heaven and earth).
>
> BTW we learned the term "waw consecutive" instead of "waw conversive"
> because it is normally used as the continuation ("and") of a narrative
> instead of only as "tense converter".
>
> To answer another question that came up on the difference between
> "modern" and biblical Hebrew: I learned some "modern" Hebrew in Israel
> at an ulpan before learning any "biblical" Hebrew and found that I
> could read much of the Tanach (albeit very slowly). Some of the
> grammar of biblical Hebrew was strange and some words were used with
> "unusual" meanings, but I could understand most of it. The parts that
> were very difficult for me, was the poetic language as used in the
> Psalms and especially Proverbs. I am not sure if it was the grammar or
> the vocabulary (or both) which made these parts so difficult to
> understand.
>
> The fact that biblical Hebrew did not use "tenses" as we know it in
> European languages (and "modern" Hebrew), was one of the things I had
> to get my head around when I started learning Biblical Hebrew later...
> this is also where I learned the terms "perfectum" and "imperfectum".
> So far this usage has seemed pretty straightforward to me in the
> Bible, but this discussion have convinced me to look more closely at
> this in future.
>
> Regards
> Chavoux
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