Biblical Hebrew Forum

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

isaac, 

frankly, i am sick and tired of having to deal with your old routine 
each and every time the four-letter word is mentioned on b-hebrew 
(the word "verb").

the truth which you ignore is that MANY languages, besides hebrew, denote 
the future by a fore-unit, the past by an aft-unit, and the present 
by the absence of both. just WHAT unit they choose as fore and aft, 
varies according to the language. this may (or may not) depict a 
"primitive sense of direction" in language, or a "primordial" form 
of tense. namely, your back and forth arrows.

these include, needless to say, most semitic languages, old and new, 
but also most older (and many modern) indo-european languages and
probably additional language families. even in MODERN english, the 
main simple tenses (used in the germanic languages before they were modified 
by a vulgar latin modal component) are of this type:
 
i SHALL-study (fore unit), i studi-ED (aft unit), i study (no-unit).

(you should study linguistics.)

so, hebrew has verbs after all - what a relief. can we PLEASE stop 
eating bananas now and go back to more mundane b-hebrew topics? 

nir cohen

>> By a certain agreement, and by a certain agreement only, an aft personal
pronoun is used to indicate past action, as in say $ALAXTA = $ALAX-TA, 'you
have sent', while a fore personal pronoun is used to indicate future action,
as in TI$LAX = TI-$LAX, 'you will send'. 

>> An English equivalent system would have been: banana eat-I for past action,
and banana I-eat for future action.