isaac, frankly, i am sick and tired of having to deal with your old routine each and every time the four-letter word is mentioned on b-hebrew (the word "verb").
the truth which you ignore is that MANY languages, besides hebrew, denote the future by a fore-unit, the past by an aft-unit, and the present by the absence of both. just WHAT unit they choose as fore and aft, varies according to the language. this may (or may not) depict a "primitive sense of direction" in language, or a "primordial" form of tense. namely, your back and forth arrows. these include, needless to say, most semitic languages, old and new, but also most older (and many modern) indo-european languages and probably additional language families. even in MODERN english, the main simple tenses (used in the germanic languages before they were modified by a vulgar latin modal component) are of this type: i SHALL-study (fore unit), i studi-ED (aft unit), i study (no-unit). (you should study linguistics.) so, hebrew has verbs after all - what a relief. can we PLEASE stop eating bananas now and go back to more mundane b-hebrew topics? nir cohen >> By a certain agreement, and by a certain agreement only, an aft personal pronoun is used to indicate past action, as in say $ALAXTA = $ALAX-TA, 'you have sent', while a fore personal pronoun is used to indicate future action, as in TI$LAX = TI-$LAX, 'you will send'. >> An English equivalent system would have been: banana eat-I for past action, and banana I-eat for future action. _______________________________________________ b-hebrew mailing list [email protected] http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/b-hebrew
