One of the good things about oral=-aural pedagogy is that it forces
teachers to look at the language from a different perspective, and in
so doing they often discover areas where they were misconstruing
or misapplying their perceived 'grammatical' position.
vayyixtov Shulman
The present tense is virtually non-existent. In fact I doubt you can find asingle instance of it.>
I am not sure what Moshe is referring to, but he has pointed
to a spot where fully-trained biblical PhDs intuitively
mis-apply the 'grammar gridwork' that is in their head.
By the way, all language and grammar ultimately exists in people's heads,
There are maybe close to a billion copies of English currently being carried
around on the planet, and no one of them is exactly the same.
Coming to BH:
If a person was working on something and someone asked what the person
was doing, or where they were standing, or what they were seeing
would the default statement be
A.
hu bone [davar]
hu `omed [sham]
hu ro'e [et ha-`ets]
(Yes, word order may change, and in conversation certain assumed pieces
of a sentence may be dropped out.
I'm only asking about the best verb form to match the context.)
or would one say
B.
hu yivne [davar]
hu ya`amod [sham]
hu yir'e [et ha-`ets]
or
C.
hu bana [davar]
hu `amad [sham]
hu ra'a [et ha-`ets]
?
Most Hebraicists have answered "B". Rarely, C, and frequently
people have preempted an answer to say that A would not be
biblical Hebrew!
This came up in the Cohelet project (for which I was a consultant/participant
but did not control the output, I'll deal with that in a different thread.)
More than one professor in the project wanted to say "B" and claimed that
that was the truly authentic biblical Hebrew and to be used as default in a
classroom. They correctly didn't want modern Hebrew for their examples.
It took months before this was resolved. There are common problems
with the notion of 'present tense' and common prejudices that twenty years
of schooling can bring to the table.
So I asked the question in reverse.
Find five examples of YIQTOL being used in such a situation,
a. not in a question,
b. not in poetry (where time is often in the eye of the beholder),
c. not in a habitual or omnitemporal or timeless context.
Examples should be positive and refer to an actual situation that was
part of the situation of the conversation.
Not one example of YIQTOL was produced.
But there were quite a few participle constructions
attested for such situations. Yes, "A".
And 'Yes' in both First Temple Hebrew and in Second Temple Hebrew.
Why is this important? Because this is a frequent situation in a classroom
and the correct structures need to be used. If you brought Isaiah or Jeremiah
to a classroom they would say that the students kotvim 'are writing',
yoshvim 'are sitting', 'shom`im' 'are listening', or whatever else one
or another
would be doing at any one time. And they would not be speaking modern
Hebrew. Joosten was correct about this in his article in '89 (Predicative
participle) [See my article in the Verbless Clause '99 for a correction of his
word order paramater.]
--
Randall Buth, PhD
www.biblicalulpan.org
randallbuth AT gmail.com
Biblical Language Center
Learn Easily - Progress Further - Remember for Life
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