Dear George,
Thank you for your clarification. I agree with you that language is
"imperfect." And the last word regarding the verbal system of Classical Hebrew
is not said. My parameters can be applied to any language, but it s true that
when the parameters are applied to Hebrew, they exclude data from cognate
languages. My view is that cognate languages cannot be used to ascertain the
nature of Hebrew verbs; we should only study how verbs are used in the Hebrew
texts.
That does not mean that a study of the verbal systems of the cognate languages
is a vaste of time. To the contrary. A study of these languages will give us a
background that is important in connection with the study of Hebrew verbs, at
least if we are working on a thesis. A presentation of a new view of the Hebrew
verbal system would require that we know the state of the art—the viewpoint of
other scholars and the basis of these viewpoints. One of the pioneers in the
explanation of Hebrew verbs in the light of cognate languages was Hans Bauer
("Die Tempora im semitischen ," Beiträge zur Assyriologie und Semitischen
Sprachwissenschaft 8, 1910 pp.1-53). He claimed that the Hebrews had adopted
the Akkadian tense system and had mixed it with the Canananite system. Thus,
Akkadian IPRUS (called preterit) became past tense in Hebrew and was the basis
of the WAYYIQTOL form. Other scholars have claimed that a short Hebrew preterit
came from the short Ugaritic YAQTUL form (in contrast with the long YAQTULU).
These, and other claims must be assessed as a background to the study of Hebrew
verbs. I have taught courses in Hebrew, Aramaic, Ethiopic, Phoenician-Punic,
Syriac, Ugaritic, and the Amarna letters, and I have translated many documents
from all these languages into Norwegian, except from Syriac . You may guess
that I during my teaching and translation have scrutinized the verbal systems
of each language. In all these languages, except Syriac, there is a lack of
tenses, and the verbs express aspects. This is even the case in Ethiopic, which
is the youngest of the mentioned languages.
I have not found any evidence in favor of a Hebrew adoption of a verb form from
any of these languages. I have particularly done much work on Ugaritic (A book
with a Norwegian translation of most of the Ugaritic documents has been
published; I made the half of the translations and my students made the other
half). And I am stunned by all the claims by scholars in the 20th century that
the short YAQTUL form is the antecedent of the WAYYIQTOL form. The Ugaritic
verbal systeml clearly is aspectual, and the verbs can have past, present, and
future meaning. A fine discussion of this is found in "Biblical Hebrew in its
Northwest Semitic Setting; Typological and Historical Perspectives," eds, E.
Fassberg and A Hurvitz," 2006.
My parameters are only applied to the text of the Tanakh, but I have carefully
studied the different scholarly viewpoints of Hebrew verbs and the verbal
systems of cognate languages.
Best regards,
Rolf Furuli
Stavern
Norway
Tirsdag 28. Mai 2013 10:09 CEST skrev George Athas <[email protected]>:
> Thanks Rolf. I'm using data from cognate languages to see the wayyiqtol and
> jussive forms as connected, yet different to yiqtol. To put it another way,
> the jussive appears to be a bare wayyiqtol (ie. without waw + gemination).
> This means the waw + gemination adds something that would appear to turn the
> jussive (a desire for a particular action/state) into something seen as a
> reality, hence my 'live action' terminology. In other words, the wayyiqtol
> actualises the jussive.
>
> I find your research intriguing, but the difficulty I have is that its
> methodology is limited in scope. I can see how you're using an unpointed text
> to draw the conclusion that wayyiqtol and yiqtol are really the same basic
> form, but I think this excludes data from cognate languages that demonstrate
> a differentiation between the two verbs, such that they are genetically
> distinct. I think we need to take greater account of the organic nature of
> language, and I'm not sure your methodology leaves room for this.
>
> The other thing to say, which I mentioned to Karl, is that language is often
> imperfect (excuse the pun), and therefore we should expect a degree of
> inconsistency in usage. This is simply because language is a human product
> and gets used and abused. But it is an important point because function is
> the ultimate arbiter of language use. Morphology contributes a lot, and there
> needs to be an underlying consistency in forms, but function can allow for
> some odd usages.
>
> In any case, thanks for clarifying.
>
>
> GEORGE ATHAS
> Dean of Research,
> Moore Theological College (moore.edu.au)
> Sydney, Australia
>
>
_______________________________________________
b-hebrew mailing list
[email protected]
http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/b-hebrew
