>
> >>Not sure if I should even ask this...has anybody ever heard of a
> >>theory that Hebrew has no verbs at all?
>
> Not such an odd question. We often take the grammatical categories of our
> own language and attempt to impose them on other languages. Many
> languages don't have "definitie articles" as we have in English and
> Hebrew.
>
> The English forms "I ate, I have eaten, I was eating" are also not
> paralleled in other languages.
>
> So we need to examine our assumption that our categories automatically
> fit onto other languages.
True, but this suggestion was that there are *no* verbs at all. I
couldn't help wondering: if that's the case, why has so much been
written about the Hebrew Verbal System, including the lead article
in the current "Hebrew Studies"?!?!?!?! I suspect that the person
who made this statement misunderstood something that was said,
probably a long time ago, WRT Hebrew verbless clauses. I'm
following up on it from that angle, but I wanted to know if anybody
had heard any such theory ever propounded.