>> "... the first Hebrew grammarians entered the scene. They made
>> their grammars on the basis of induction and when they interpreted
>> the verbal system of the MT, they did so on the basis of *tense*
>> because they did not know aspect..."
> Wait a minute! The earliest grammarians of Hebrew may not have had
> a theory of tense (I don't know) but their native language was
> Arabic, which is much more clearly aspectual then Hebrew. So they
> should have intuitively interpreted Hebrew in terms of aspect. If
> they did not, then we may be able to learn something about the ways
> in which BH works in terms of tense versus aspect by trying to
> understand their point of view.
But on the other hand, "Middle Hebrew" (or whatever you want to call
it) was rather tense-based (qatal Past, qotel Present, yiqtol future,
basically the same as modern Israeli...).
--
--Henry Churchyard churchyh AT ccwf.cc.utexas.edu
Tense and Grammarians...,
Henry Churchyard, 12/12/1998