Dear Peter,
You paint a carricature of my position. In view of all the times we have
discussed Hebrew verbs, you should be able to do better. I do not deny
exceptions and a substandard use of language. What I challenge is ad hoc
explanations in order to save a hypothesis. Therefore I make a linguistic
demand that exceptions must be explained. For example, In the 19th century
QATAL was viewed as past tense, and at the end of the century, as past tense
or the perfective aspect. It was discovered that several QATALs had future
reference, and in order to save the theory, the "prophetic perfect" was
postulated, the action was completed in the mind of the prophet. (A. B.
Davidson (1894) "Hebrew syntax") is a good example. The view has later been
parroted by different grammarians, but I have never seen anyone proving the
claim.
The principle of a property being uncancellable is very simple: Even a
shoolboy understands that the clauses "I will come yesterday" and "I came
tomorrow" are ungrammatical. There is no purpose in trying to find a special situation where one of the clauses can be used.
If QATAL represents past tense, a reasonable number cannot have future
reference. If we find 1,000 examples of QATAL future reference, these are
too many to say they are exceptions. The fact that some words have a
substandard use is not relevant in the literary text of the Tanakh, and
neither is the fact that words may behave strange in strange contexts. We
cannot argue that the "dominant use" of the QATAL is past (53.5 % have past
reference), therefore it is a past tense. Even though we reduced the number
with future references to 500 or 300, and they occurred in normal contexts,
still we could not accept that QATAL is a past tense. The only way to uphold
the past tense view of QATAL would be to demonstrate (not just claim) that
the examples with future reference were exceptions. That would include
showing how and why they were exceptions.
The points above do not indicate a static view of language. In my
dissertation there is a detailed analysis of Hebrew verbs from a diachronic
point of view. The conclusion is that while the language to some extent do change in the
youngest books of the Tanakh, the evidence is that the meaning of the verbs
has not changed.
Best regards,
Rolf Furuli
Univeersity of Oslo
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