Biblical Hebrew Forum

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

karl,

>>> Don’t you know that wikipedia is not an authoritative source? That it’s
someone’s personal opinion who just happened to edit that particular piece,
which may or may not be accurate? 

carlota smith has expressed similar opinions in several papers (~1991-2007).
i can cite many other writers which examined BH from a tensual point of view.

>    WIKIPEDIA: Not all grammaticalise the three-way system of
past–present–future.
>    For example, some two-tense languages such as English and Japanese 
> express
>    past and non-past,


>>> As a native speaker of English, this is wrong—English is a three-way
system with past, present and future, with the past and future having subsets
such as future perfect, past and past perfect, etc. 

i agree; but why stop at 3? depending on your own description, it can be three
or more.

>>> That’s not counting syntactical structures that indicate aspect and mood
that are so regular that they can count as grammaticalizations.

let us just take the indicative:

i did
i do
i will do
i have  done
i had done
i will have done
i am doing
i am going to do

you cannot say, for example, that "i have done" is a "past sub-tense", as you
do; as often the action continues at the present (or: perfective). nor that "i
do" is present, e.g. when somebody says "the sun shines" at midnight. so, you
really have to admit there are MORE THAN THREE TEMPORAL STATES being
grammaticalized here. also, "i had done" is prior, as in "By the time i
noticed, he had disappeared". so, this is use of RELATIVE past as well as
ABSOLUTE past. similarly, "will have done" is ARELATIVE past and (possibly but
not necessarily) ABSOLUTE future. 

the "absolute past, present, future" tripartite division is too crude for most
languages.

nir cohen