Exodus 10:3 until when

[Jason Hare]

Yep, I'm right there with you. Vayyiqtol is pretty clearly a past tense form.

[Isaac Fried]

Jason writes

The form of the verb is dependent on what is being spoken of. It doesn't center itself on the time of the audience's hearing the communication.

The verb form is chosen by the speaker, rather than being "dependent on what is being spoken of". And, yes, "It doesn't center itself on the time of the audience's hearing the communication."
In referring to a thing done in the past the Hebrew speaker uses the verbal form with a suffixed personal pronoun:
שָמַרְתִּי = שמר-אתי
שָמַרְתָּ = שמר-אתה
שָמַרְתְּ = שמר-את
שָמְרָה = שמר-היא
שָמַרְנוּ = שמר-אנו
שְמַרְתֶּם = שמר-אתם
שְמַרְתֶּן = שמר-אתן
שָמְרוּ = שמר-הוּא
In referring to a thing promised to be done in the future the Hebrew speaker uses the verbal form with a prefixed personal pronoun and a suffixed person qualifier:
אֶשְמוֹר = אני- שמור
תִּשְמוֹר = אתה-שמור
תִּשְמְרִי = את-שמר-היא
יִשְמוֹר = היא-שמוֹר
נִשְמוֹר = אנו-שמור
תִּשְמְרוּ = אתם-שמרוּ
יִשְמְרוּ = היא-שמר-הוּא
תִּשְמוֹרְנָה = אתן-שמורנה

Isaac Fried, Boston University
www.hebrewetymology.com

[Jason Hare]

Isaac,

We're talking about the mapping of tense into verb forms. I don't see how any of what you've just written is relevant to the discussion. You're talking about the forms and identification of person-gender-number agreement. The forms don't change, no matter how one interprets temporality in specific verbs. You haven't added anything to the discussion because form isn't relevant.

[Isaac Fried]

Jason wrote

We're talking about the mapping of tense into verb forms

I am sorry, but there is no such thing as "the mapping of tense into verb forms". Tense is not "mapped". Never.

You're talking about the forms and identification of person-gender-number agreement.

Yes. This is what Hebrew grammar is all about.

The forms don't change, no matter how one interprets temporality in specific verbs

The form changes with the person

You haven't added anything to the discussion because form isn't relevant.

Isn't relevant to what?

Isaac Fried, Boston University
www.hebrewetymology.com

[kwrandolph]

In other words, the time relation of the verb form is determined by context, not by any marker in the verb form itself. Right?

Well, except for the wayyiqtol form. But I know Karl will disagree with me on this.

90% of the time, it's a Past Narrative form. That's a pretty solid percentage.

Yes I disagree with that. Just because 90% of the time it’s used in a past event narration context doesn’t make it a past tense marker. The 10% of the times that it’s used in other contexts show that it’s not a tense marker. Dewayne is correct here.

Karl W. Randolph.

[Jonathan Beck]

My apologies. I confused past tense marker with your comments on past tense in poetry.

Can you give an example of a wayyiqtol that is not past tense?

Jonathan

[Jason Hare]

Can you give an example of a wayyiqtol that is not past tense?

Cook mentions a couple of situations in which vayyiqṭōl is used outside of past narrative. I think (3) would be the most regular. It stands in for the perfect in logical conclusions, which is why the perfect is so frequently used in conditional statements in which we would use hypothetical language in English.

The identification of wayyiqtol as a past (tense) narrative conjugation appears prima facie quite straightforward. In anyone’s statistical count, well over 90% of the more than 15,000 occurrences of the form in BH appear in prose narrative with past temporality. The relatively few uniform functions assigned to wayyiqtol in the standard grammars are in line with these statistics: (1) simple past (usually with the idea of succession); (2) present perfect and past perfect (the latter under restricted circumstances); (3) logical consecution (past or present time), (4) some exceptional (apparently) future uses in prophetic contexts (Bergsträsser 1962: 2.36–45; Davidson 1901: 70–78; S. R. Driver 1998: 70–99; Gibson 1994: 95–102; Joüon 1993: 389–96; Kautzsch 1910: 326–30; Meyer 1992: 2.44–46; Waltke and O’Connor 1990: 543–63).

[source: John A. Cook, Time and the Biblical Hebrew Verb: The Expression of Tense, Aspect, and Modality in Biblical Hebrew, ed. Cynthia L. Miller-Naudé and Jacobus Naudé, vol. 7, Linguistic Studies in Ancient West Semitic (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2012), 256–257.]

Also interesting from the same place:

Rather, the usual explanation now is that two prefix conjugations, which were originally distinct because of the presence of a final vowel on the one (i.e., *yaqtul versus *yaqtulu), partially merged morphologically through the loss of final short vowels (see §2.3 for the full comparative-historical argument). In BH, reflexes of the short *yaqtul form appear in the Jussive and the wayyiqtol, while the long *yaqtulu form is realized in yiqtol. This explanation accounts for the long-observed morphological parallel between the Jussive and wayyiqtol, wherein they both exhibit the same apocopated pattern when possible (see discussion of Jussive and prefix pattern in Kummerow 2007a). The question of the relationship between the Jussive and wayyiqtol reflexes of *yaqtul (i.e., whether there are two homonymous *yaqtul forms or a single polysemous form; Huehnergard 1988: 20) seems both intractable and moot—intractable inasmuch as no clear diachrony between the two reflexes can reasonably be posited given their distinct semantic contrast; and moot, in that, given the wide semantic discrepancy between the reflexes in BH, there is no risk of confusing the forms.

[source: John A. Cook, Time and the Biblical Hebrew Verb: The Expression of Tense, Aspect, and Modality in Biblical Hebrew, ed. Cynthia L. Miller-Naudé and Jacobus Naudé, vol. 7, Linguistic Studies in Ancient West Semitic (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2012), 257.]

[Jason Hare]

I am sorry, but there is no such thing as "the mapping of tense into verb forms". Tense is not "mapped". Never.

This is why you studied and teach Mathematics rather than Linguistics. "I'm sorry," but you are out of your field here. The fact that Linguistics is a field that you are not trained to discuss doesn't mean that the rest of us should just disregard the studies conducted by linguists.

Mapping tense form and meaning for L2 learning – From theory to practice

Chinese Verb Tense? Using English Parallel Data to Map Tense onto Chinese and Subsequent Tense Classification

[Isaac Fried]

Karl writes

Unlike modern Israeli Hebrew, Biblical Hebrew had no tenses.

I am afraid that this, often repeated, statement is both wrong and misleading.
A language is said to have tense if different forms (in Hebrew: the root augmented by differently distributed personal pronouns) of the same verb are selected to be used, one for a deed done and another for a deed still contemplated. In this sense both Biblical Hebrew and spoken Hebrew, both sharing the same verbal forms, have both tense.
However, the speaker may forgo the use of the expected verbal form if the time of the action is otherwise evident from the context.
Because it is spoken and practical, present day Hebrew is more careful about assigning a time to the action.

Isaac Fried, Boston University
www.hebrewetymology.com

[Jason Hare]

Karl writes

Unlike modern Israeli Hebrew, Biblical Hebrew had no tenses.

I am afraid that this, often repeated, statement is both wrong and misleading.
A language is said to have tense if different forms (in Hebrew: the root augmented by differently distributed personal pronouns) of the same verb are selected to be used, one for a deed done and another for a deed still contemplated. In this sense both Biblical Hebrew and spoken Hebrew, both sharing the same verbal forms, have both tense.
However, the speaker may forgo the use of the expected verbal form if the time of the action is otherwise evident from the context.
Because it is spoken and practical, present day Hebrew is more careful about assigning a time to the action.

Isaac Fried, Boston University
www.hebrewetymology.com

Are tenses also random then?