karl,
>> As for the rule, it’s my impression that it’s derived from narrative. How
>> does it fit other literary styles?
i believe the rule in every language is set by dialogue. but it may be defended
that narrative
is also a "type of dialogue", hence should not be too different.
as to poetry, each language has its own style(s), and poetry may be quite
different than narrative. in BH there is disagreement if poetry should be
considered a different dialect.
it has been observed that many poetic traditions include an important gnomic
element, and i suspect that this element then migrates back into the narrative.
i am not an expert on ancient greek but i have read that it has an important
gnomic element in both narrative and poetry. and i suspect that greek gnomic
aorist has its origins in poetry.
also the tibetan and chinese poetic traditions uses gnomic grammar. chinese
verb
grammar is in fact atemporal. (sanskrit writings too?)
>>> Inthis case, because narrative makes up such a large portion of Tanakh,
>>> does not a strict statistical (bean counting) analysis give a skewed
>>> picture of how it was used? Not unlike asking for American impression
>>> ofObama, but asking only Blacks? Is it possible to get an unskewed sample?
i agree... statistics is a source of many misconceptions, because it is easily
biased by a priori assumptions.
some scholars study only narrative, or only poetry (michel!), or both. even
when word order is considered, some scholars (if i recall, cook, holmstedt, de
caen?) do not count the waw-prefixed forms as they claim they are "marked".
then they count just the "unmarked" forms and come to the conclusion that BH is
SVO rather than VSO as most
people assume.
this, joined with andrason 2011, might imply that VSO was the dominant word
order in "ancient hebrew" (pre-BH), which supposedly lacked the waw-prefixed
forms, just like canaanite.
BH poetry differs from narrative mainly in structure and word order (couplet,
chiasm). besides, it is dominated
by gnomic grammar. in the extreme gnomic clause, tense and aspect both
disappear since no story is told, rather a situatio is described modally. in a
sense, the extreme gnomic verb form is atemporal and imperfective-modal.
no story is told: hence wayiqtol and weqatal are rare. indeed, in the few
chapters in psalms where a story is told, wyiqtol (as preterite) is very
frequent.
atemporal: meaning that both qatal and yiqtol have the same value: a continuous
tense which does not
specify past nor future. rather than longacre's explanation ("temporal jumps").
actually,
there is a tendency for couplets which mix one qatal with one yiqtol. this
"qatal-yiqtol opposition" represents
an element of poetry called variation, rather than a grammatical difference.
but this can only be used in a
gnomic grammar. you cannot find it in the narrative.
poetic elements return to narrative: the prophets mix narrative and poetry, and
so also often use gnomic grammar.
also, the chiasm/fronting (as part of a larger element of parallelism) is quite
common also in he narrative. and the qatal-yiqtol opposition in poetry has the
modified form in nrrative: qatal-wayiqtol and yiqtol-weqatal, perhaps
explaining the semantic similarity within each of these pairs.
nir cohen
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