Stand-Alone Perfect and Imperfect examples with identical 'time' meanings

[Chris Watts]

I cannot imagine that Weingreen says nothing at all about how to render vəqatal and vayyiqtol verbs.

Possibly becasuse I have "A Practical Grammar for Classical Hebrew" 1952. (1st Published 1929) No doubt need a new version.

[Jason Hare]

I'll try to look through and see where he discusses it.

[Chris Watts]

I'll try to look through and see where he discusses it.

Starting page 90 assuming you have this book. But it is scant information, very basic always about vowel changes which should not be the emphasis in these things - honestly I feel far far too much emphasis is laid upon vowel changes in most books and is not practical, it's a bit like detailing the inner workings of a cell without understanding how the cells work together to form the membrane - I have learned more from this forum about the weqatal and yiktol etc than from any grammar book. Except of course I am still going through van de Merwe's reference grammar.

chris watts

[Jason Hare]

The perfect is actually discussed in Weingreen's grammar on pages 56–57. The imperfect is treated on pages 75–76.

In Waltke and O'Connor, these are treated far more thoroughly in sections 30 (qatal), 31 (yiqtol), 32 (vəqatal), and 33 (vayyiqtol).

Rather than picking through a grammar, it would be good to work through the translation exercises from beginning to end. The translates go from really easy to harder and harder. It's supposed to introduce you to more complex structures as you work through it. You get the meaning and form from the exercises, not just from reading.

[Chris Watts]

Unfortunately I do not have Waltke and O'Connors book. Your comments are noted though. Thanks. You must have a different Weingreen for example my page 56 is Pronouns. Anyway, Page Kelly's books took me beyond Beginner and then I forgot 75% of it after 6 years. After all those exercises, which I completed and tried to return to - I get bored very easily and end up retaining nothing. Hence I turned to Reading the scriptures in context, this benefits me far more. It may seem haphazard, but the whole picture still develops nicely.

Chris watts

[kwrandolph]

Hence I turned to Reading the scriptures in context, this benefits me far more. It may seem haphazard, but the whole picture still develops nicely.

Chris watts

Chris:

Hey, don’t knock it. I learned far more from reading Scriptures in context, than all the studies that I did in grammar books. But one of the lessons I learned from studying Scriptures in context is that the grammar books that I read were wrong as to the meanings of Biblical Hebrew conjugations. I include Waltke and O’Connor among those books.

As for the grammar, I find that the treatment of nouns and adjectives pretty much spot on what I learned in class and from grammar books.

But when I tried to follow Winegreen consistently in his description of verbal conjugations as referring to tense, I found I could not do so. There are too many “exceptions”.

I then tried reading the verbal conjugations as referring to aspect, from where we get “perfective” and “imperfective”. Again, I found too many “exceptions”.

I then decided merely to read for meaning, letting the language just flow over me, like how a child learns, to see what comes up. To do that requires that I read the text over and over again.

So I urge you just to read for understanding and read Tanakh over and over again. Nothing fancy.

Karl W. Randolph.

[Jason Hare]

All grammar books need to simplify issues to make them comprehensible to new learners. Everyone knows that when you get further into any language, you need to modify what you learned at the beginning. That's always the case, and it can hardly be otherwise.

However, failing to understand that more than one historical form led to the forms that we have now causes misunderstanding, since you think that every qatal is the same as all other qatals, and you try to generalize in your mind a way to justify every one of them - and you come away thinking that there is no system. The mental process of creating generalities and rules backfires because you don't see the language historically.

Again, I recommend that you read Cook's book on time and the Hebrew verb. It will clear up so many misconceptions.

[kwrandolph]

However, failing to understand that more than one historical form led to the forms that we have now causes misunderstanding, since you think that every qatal is the same as all other qatals, and you try to generalize in your mind a way to justify every one of them - and you come away thinking that there is no system. The mental process of creating generalities and rules backfires because you don't see the language historically.

The problem for you is that you don’t have any historical record from before the 15th century BC when Moses wrote the Torah, nor any evidence from native speakers after the Babylonian Exile. The only exception is that Moses may not have had to update the language when he referenced older documents to write Genesis.

When God mixed up the languages at the Tower of Babel, it is very likely that one family, or group of families, spoke Akkadian, another Aramaic, yet another Hebrew, still another Arabic, and so forth, not one group able to understand the other groups. With that being the case, there never was a “proto-Semitic” language. Nor do you have any historical, documented evidence of such a theorized history.

What we have as far as historical development is from the roughly eight centuries when natively spoken Hebrew was written down, from Moses to the Babylonian Exile, showing a language mostly cut off from foreign influences with very little change during those eight centuries. In other words, almost no historical development during that period. That sort of stability is not uncommon for isolated languages. As a result, we can analyze the language and look for its patterns, without reference to other languages. In that analysis, there is a recognizable system.

Karl W. Randolph.

[Jason Hare]

Karl,

The problems with your theory are that you assume Mosaic authorship and ignore all other Semitic languages and the evidence that they provide.

Jason

[kwrandolph]

Karl,

The problems with your theory are that you assume Mosaic authorship and ignore all other Semitic languages and the evidence that they provide.

Jason

I make the choice to take the historical documents as being accurate. It is those historical documents that make the claim for Mosaic authorship.

You on the other hand have absolutely no evidence to contradict the historical record. All you have is theory, theory born in the first decade of the 19th century then based on a belief in evolution combined with antisemitism, started by people with names like Vater (1805), De Wette (1806), Gesenius (1815) (the dates in parentheses are publication dates) and others. Only later do we get names like Reuss (1835) and his student Graf (1859). But that is all theory, with no data to back it up.

As for the cognate languages, in Biblical times speakers of the different languages mutually could not understand each other. So saying that studying those languages will help in understanding Biblical Hebrew is like studying Dutch or Norwegian in order better to understand English. Does that recommendation make sense for studying English? Then why would it make sense in understanding Biblical Hebrew?

Karl W. Randolph.