Dear Petr, I agree that the meaning of verbs are the same in prose and poetry. The opposite has often been suggested, and the reason is that so many verbs in poetic and prophetic texts contradict the scholar's definition of the verbal system. It is the scholar's view of system that should have been discarded instead of introducing ad hoc explanations that do not fit any language.
Your Arabic example is fine. It illustrates the basic methodological principle that I so often have stressed: We should make a careful distinction between semantic meaning (meaning that never change) and conversational pragmatic implicature (meaning based on the context). The author combines several pragmatic factors to convey the meaning to his readers— the intrinsic lexical meaning, and the semantic meaning of the verb forms do not change, but the combination of factors may signal something that the verb form could not express alone. This indicates that when we make our quest for the meaning of Hebrew verbs, we should only use normal clauses (prose, poetry, and prophecy) and avoid special clauses such as hypothetical conditional clauses. By using normal clauses I found 2,505 QATALs with present meaning, 2605 with present completed meaning (as English perfect) and 965 with future meaning. Conclusion: the QATAL does not have an intrinsic past tense. Further, I found 420 WAYYIQTOLs with present meaning, 289 with present completed meaning, and 177 with future meaning. Conclusion: The WAYYIQTOL does not have an intrinsic past meaning. Bewst regards, Rolf Furuli Stavern Norway Søndag 26. Mai 2013 23:54 CEST skrev Petr Tomasek <[email protected]>: > On Sun, May 26, 2013 at 03:16:49PM +0200, Rolf wrote: > > Dear George, > > > > I have two questions: > > > > 1) Is the meaning of the verb forms different in Hebrew prose and poetry? > > If the answer is affirmative, do we find a similar difference in other > > languages? (BTW, your clauses with examples of YIQTOL and QATAL are poetry). > > > > ..... > > > > > Best regards, > > > > > > Rolf Furuli > > Stavern > > Norway > > Dear Rolf, > > I'm actually convinced that the verbal forms in Hebrew are not _principially_ > different > between prose and poetry but that there are certain forms which have special > meaning > in specific contexts. > > Similarly you can find e.g. perfect "tense" in conditional sentences in > Arabic: > it doesn't denote the past tense (which is the usual meaning of this form) > but does have a specialized function here which "overrides" the usual one. > > > Best regards, > Petr Tomasek > > _______________________________________________ b-hebrew mailing list [email protected] http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/b-hebrew
