Dear Bryant, Kimmo raised methodological questions, whose answer is extremely important for the study of Hebrew verbs: Is there a a difference between "tense" and temporal reference? Can a verb in one context be a tense, and in another context be an aspect, thus loosing its tense? If I understood Kimmo correctly, his opinion is that in no language do we find a verb form that always have past reference. The best example of the opposite that I am aware of is Greek imperfect, which consistently has past reference. If this is true, one cannot argue that the non-past references of WAYYIQTOLs do not prove that WAYYIQTOL in not past tense, and that the future references of QATAL do not prove that QATAL is not a past tense, because in all languages there are such exceptions. Linguistic theory and methodology with examples from different languages can be discussed if they are relevant for the study of Hebrew.
In the work with my doctoral dissertation, I found 997 WAYYIQTOLs with past reference, and 956 QATALs with future reference. These were found in normal contexts. I also found that YIQTOLs, WEYIQTOLs, and WEQATALs have past, present, and future reference. All this show that tense (grammaticlized location in time) is non-existent in Hebrew. Best regards, Rolf Furuli Stavern Norway Søndag 1. September 2013 16:15 CEST skrev "Rev. Bryant J. Williams III" <[email protected]>: > Dear Rolf, > > The challenge to Huommo should be to do so in HEBREW not Greek since this is > a Biblical Hebrew list; and second, Greek is an Indo-European language that > really does not fit with the Semitic languages that Hebrew is a part. > > I ask that this be kept in focus because too often it appears that the > linguists and grammars are defining things from an Indo-European perspective, > aspect(?) rather than from the Hebrew language itself. > > Rev. Bryant J. Williams III _______________________________________________ b-hebrew mailing list [email protected] http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/b-hebrew
