the 19th century and up to the present. A typical example is the creation of
the ad hoc hypothesis of "prophetic perfect," which was invented in the
19th centuries. It has since been parroted over and over again in Grammars and
Textbooks, but I have never seen any serious attempt to *prove* it (See
Gesenius-Kautzsch 106, n (p.312) and Waltke-O´Connor 30. 5.1e (pp. 489-490).
And that is natural, since it is a psychological explanation, it requires a
knowledge of the minds of dead prophets.
When I started my studies of Hebrew, I had two advantages: I was a grown man
with experience, not so easily manipulated as younger students, and I had a
strong theoretical basis for critical thinking. Moreover, the professor who
taught me Semitic languages, E. E. Knudsen, was very knowledgable, had an open
mind, and encouraged his students to do critical thinking different from his own. Under his
supervision I wrote the thesis "Imperfect Consecutive and the Verbal System
of Biblical Hebrew" (362 p) in 1995 for the mag.art.degree (close to an US
Ph.D) and in 2005 I defended the doctoral dissertation, which already has
been reviewed. What did influence me? First of all, the principles I had
learned in my study of the Philosophy of science, not least to find the
smallest possible units and study each of these. I read extensively from
previous Semitic studies (one of the positive remarks of the evaluation committee
for my dissertation was that no important source relevant for the study was
lacking in the bibliography),
Hebrew verbs represented blatant violations of the very fundamental
principles of the Philosophy of science (the results of deductive and
inductive studies were taken as proofs for the hypotheses and theories). I
realized that the principles of the study of the natural sciences were not
fully applicable in a humanistic study, particularly not in the study of a
dead language. But the principles could to a great extent be applied, and at
least, they should not be violated. For example, one application of the
falsification principle can be the following prediction: If the WAYYIQTOL is
an independent conjugation coding for past tense, we will expect that the
reference time of the actions of the clauses with WAYYIQTOL in the Tanakh
occur before the deictic center; in a non-technical language: we will expect
the WAYYIQTOLs to have past reference. If we can find a reasonable number of
WAYYIQTOLs with non-past reference, the prediction is falsified.
quickly
add that in the examples with non-past tense we must be open for textual
corruption, exceptions, special contexts, special conventions in different
genres, diachronic questions, and that a language is a living medium etc. But these issues should be studied in a
scientific way, and the examples should not be brushed away by the argument
that languge is fuzzy, or the WAYYIQTOL is not yet fully grammaticalized as
apast tense. This prediction was a basic tool for my thesis of 1995. The NWT had caused me to be critical towards the modern theories of WAYYIQTOL, but its
grammatical theory did not influence me at all, since this was a study of
text, of all the WAYYIQTOLs of the Tanakh on the basis of the falsification
principle. Grammatical theories therefore were unnecessary.
Best regards,
Rolf Furuli
University of Oslo
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