[B-Greek] Imperfect and Aorist Aspects
Rolf Furuli
furuli at online.no
Fri Sep 8 12:10:33 EDT 2006
Dear Randall,
Your observation that Hebrew Perfect without WAW does not occur together
with the 52 examples of MAHAR in the Hebrew Bible is true. But the
conclusion you draw is not at all necessary. A case is stronger when we show
what actually IS found instead of what IS NOT found. In my dissertation
dealing with the verbal system of Classical Hebrew I analyse about one
thousand perfects as having future reference. This would in my view falsify
any claim that Perfect represents past tense (grammaticalized past location
in time).
If a language is purely aspectual, different tools are used to signal
temporal reference, and particular verb forms may generally be used for a
particular temporal reference (without being tenses). An understanding of
these tools is passed from parents to children, and this is a part of the
linguistic convention and idiom of the language. That certain verb forms are
used with MAHAR is not unnatural. BTW, in two instances (Exodus 19:10 and
Judges 19:9) perfects with prefixed WAW are used in connection with MAHAR. I
take these as the conjunction WAW+plus perfect, thus being counterexamples
to your claim, but you will probably not interpret these as perfects.
A great defect in most studies of verbs, both Hebrew and Greek, is the lack
of differentiation between tense and temporal reference. I see no purpose in
testing our views of the verbal system of a dead language by "using it,"
since this might mean that we project our modern views of what a language
should be into this dead language. But to find parameters that can
differentiate between time and tense and test the verbal system of the dead
language against these is highly meaningful. I have done this with the about
80.000 finite and infinite verbs of classical Hebrew, and my conclusion is
that tense is not grammaticalized. I have used the mentioned parameters on
NT Greek to some extent, and I hope to be able analyze all the verbs of the
NT and several texts of Classical Greek as well in the future. My
preliminary conclusions are that Greek Present represents the imperfective
aspect and Aorist represents the perfective aspect, but neither of them has
any tense; Imperfect represents the imperfective aspect and past tense and
Furure represent future tense. I would recommend the following book to the
list members: Mari Broman Olsen (1997) A Semantic and Pragmatic Model of
Lexical and Grammatical Aspect. New York:Garland Publishing. Unfortunately,
her examples are rather few, but her method is excellent.
Best regards,
Rolf Furuli
University of Oslo
> As an aside,
> sometimes I find Greek people getting comfort from a supposed sister
> Biblical language "that does not have tense", as though Hebrew was
> such. (Porter, for one, explicitly used such a supporting argument.)
>
> I like to ask Hebraists how to say approximately "tomorrow I will
> come" in Biblical Hebrew.
>
> I would accept MAHAR AVO, UVATI MAHAR, ANI BA MAHAR,
> but I would not accept *MAHAR BATI (* asterix marks unacceptable form).
> they didn't say that in biblical Hebrew. Ever.
> Kind of curious: if adverbs marked time relationship and verbs only
> marked aspect,
> why no *MAHAR BATI? Partial Ans: Ancient biblical Hebrew writers
> hadn't read 19th century non-Hebrew Hebrew grammars. Bottom line:
> Hebrew had both aspectual and temporal features within its binary
> TENSE-ASPECT-MOOD system. (PS: *MAHAR BATI would correspond in greek
> to *AYRION HLQON. I'm afraid I don't accept that either for 'tomorrow
> I will come'.)
>
> ERRWSO
> Randall Buth
>
> --
> Randall Buth, PhD
> www.biblicalulpan.org
> χάρις ὑμῖν καὶ εἰρήνη πληθυνθείη
> שלום לכם וברכות
> ybitan at mscc.huji.ac.il
> randallbuth at gmail.com
> ---
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