Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Jerry Shepherd <jshepherd53 AT gmail.com>]

Hi Karl,

 

Again, as I said in an earlier post, no one ever sat down and determined that in the Hebrew language, a wc+imperfect would equal past tense.  I would, however, argue that, with usage, the past tense became its primary function.

 

If I were to give my Hebrew students a test in which I simply listed 100 wc+imperfects, chosen randomly fronm the Hebrew Bible, and asked the students to translate them into English, and give them a past, present, or future time reference, if a student translated all of them using the past tense, then according to Rolf's statistics given in an earlier post, the student would score 93.1 on the exam.  I think the student would be pretty happy with that.

 

Blessings,

 

Jerry

 

Jerry Shepherd

Taylor Seminary

Edmonton, Alberta

jshepherd53 AT gmail.com

On Thu, Dec 13, 2012 at 11:26 AM, K Randolph <kwrandolph AT gmail.com> wrote:

Frank:

On Thu, Dec 13, 2012 at 9:16 AM, Dr. Frank Matheus <post AT matheus.de> wrote:

Dear list,

 

if we perceived a text comprising only of one word, e.g. וַיֹּ֙אמֶר , to which time sphere would we sort the proposition, and why would we do so?

We would not know because this is not a grammaticalization for any time sphere. It could be present, it could be future, without further context, there’s no way to tell.

 

Frank

Karl W. Randolph. 

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