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  • From: John Leake <jesleake AT yahoo.co.uk>
  • To: b-hebrew <b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] wayyiqtol
  • Date: Wed, 15 May 2013 23:16:15 +0100

Sorry, Rolf, do you mean that short vowels are regularly represented on Qumran texts? I must admit that I was not under that impression; even Mishnaic Hebrew typically only uses matres lectiones for long vowels, doesn't it? But I must admit that all my Qumran reading has been from Lohse's _Die Texte aus Qumran: Hebräisch und Deutsch_, which Grace Emmerson (I think) told me was normalized.

I'd have thought the only real clue was looking for apocopated forms, as indeed you have. I can't imagine gemination ever being provable or disprovable, though I can see the idea of stress giving ride to gemination. 

Assuming that Arabic can by taken as a near cognate, however (as it too has a yaqtul - jussive - form used in place of the suffix form qatala where it is negated by the negative particle lam). My Arabic guess would be that something akin to the emphatic particle la (لَ) might do it. Ant the particle that comes to mind is, of course, the enclitic particle נא (which has a qameS, often a sign of a historic short /a/). In Arabic, fa (فَ) combines with la to form a combined particle fal (فَلْ) that often introduces the apodosis of a condition - and a jussive may well be the verb in the apodosis (of course, ideas of time reference are hard to pin down in conditionals, but the jussive may be equivalent to the suffix tense in these statements). I could imagine something similar in Hebrew: wa-na-yiqtol -> wan-yiqtol -> wayyiqtol, the first person singular becoming wā'eqtol just as the original article han- became hā- before aleph and resh (losing the nun by analogy).To me it makes perfect sense and makes the waw-consecutive seem rather easy to understand.

But it's just a casual hypothesis I toyed with thirty years ago, excited by patrers shared between Hebrew and Arabic. Of course, it might be something I absorbed while reading, and if not I'm sure I'm not alone in coming up with it. Stii, sometimes our youthful 'theories' turn out to have be unconscious borrowings.

John Leake 
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ان صاحب حياة هانئة لا يدونها انما يحياها
He who has a comfortable life doesn't write about it - he lives it
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On 15 May 2013, at 19:18, "Rolf" <rolf.furuli AT sf-nett.no> wrote:

Dear Dave,

I know you as a fine Hebrew scholar, and I also know that you have done much work on the DSS. This thread was supposed to be descriptive and not argumentative—we were asked to outline our positions on WAYYIQTOL. But when you use the words "a gross misstatement," I think I am entitled to clear up the issue. 

In scholarly studies it is very important not to assume anything before we start. So, we cannot ASSUME that a grammatical form WAYYIQTOL existed in BCE. But we must look at the writings we have from BCE, and they are the DSS. What do a morphological study of the DSS reveal? About 500 prefix forms with prefixed WAW. These forms are not geminated and the vowel patah is not represented by the maters lexiones. This justifies my  statement that "the WAYYIQTOL form was not known in the DSS"—only YIQTOLs with prefixed WAW. The data I presented from Origen and the Samaritan Penbtateuch justify my claim that "the WAYYIQTOL was not known before the middle of the first millennium CE." The only way to show that this is "a gross misstatement" is to refer to manuscripts where the WAYYIQTOL is found. This is a challenge to you.

You  refer to Mishnaic Hebrew,  to long and short forms and to irregular verbs. But these data can be interpreted in different ways,  and they prove nothing regarding the existence of a grammatical WAYYIQTOL form.  As far as the data are concerned, they show that the  WAYYIQTOL form did not existe before the middle of the first millennium CE. This is not conjecture, it is not an argument, but it is an OBSERVATION. And please, do not mix semantic meaning with conversational pragmatic implicature.


Best regards,


Rolf Furuli
Stavern
Norway




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