[B-Greek] Imperfect and Aorist Aspects

Randall Buth ybitan at mscc.huji.ac.il
Fri Sep 8 14:45:00 EDT 2006


Shalom Rolf,

Thank you for a concise statement. I'll intersperse and be brief,  
too. Specifically Greek discussions will be toward the end.

Rolf egrapsen
 >Your observation that Hebrew Perfect without WAW does not occur  
together
with the 52 examples of MAHAR in the Hebrew Bible is true. >

good

...
 >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.>

Yes, we must differ on those two, as far as I can tell there is a  
3000 year tradition on my side.  Hebrew users, at least from medieval  
times to present, (and I would include ancients by virtue of internal  
complementary distribution and broad comparison with targum, Syriac,  
and LXX), consider vav+suffix conjugation as the same tense-aspect or  
whatever as the 'long prefix' yiqtol.

AND I would add that there is no example of wayyiqtol + MAHAR,  
either. This, too, is important.

That still leaves 52 to zero for this collocation. I would agree that  
this does not PROVE. (Dang, I can't even prove that English has a  
future tense.) But it does illustrate and show and demand some  
explanation. And I am happy with 0 out of 52 as being outside of  
"accidental" (what one aspect-only professor suggested to me). More  
important, though, see the Greek challenge below.

...
 >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.>

You may be missing the point on this. (First, in several respects  
your own analysis and methodology is already projecting a modern  
view, e.g., agnosticism toward wayyiqtol.) But more importantly,
using a language becomes a rapid heuristic tool. It more rapidly  
locates and focuses on the weak spots and ambiguities in a language.  
It is not data (and you should know me well enough to know that I  
would not do such), it merely helps us look for data and find data.  
for example, asking Hebrew professors to say "I am walking to the  
table" "I see the man"  stimulates discovery. I would claim that  
"*ELEX el ha-shulHan"  'I would walk to the table' is incorrect if  
referring to what is currently going on. But I keep meeting  
professors who try to say that. they even claim that it is the basic/ 
default but can't give three examples!  What does that say about our  
field?  (Where is this situation coming from? My guess--19th century  
Arabic-speaking Hebrew-grammar writers. Arabic uses such prefix  
verbs. [yes, I speak that other modern Semitic language, too.]) if  
you tried using your system, you might be able to find places where  
you would predict one thing but might end up seeing something else.  
Or perhaps you would predict something and find a strong contrary  
majority that needs to be dealt with. It is such predictions that  
become heuristic. Call them thought experiments. sort of like when  
learning a modern language, looking up a word gloss but then looking  
up the examples in the reverse direction to make sure you've got what  
you want. this is the other half of the scientific method. One does  
not need to worry about modern projections any more than when you  
submit the data to your analytical framework.  Anyway, professors  
don't usually do this reverse thought experiment and my feeling is  
that the field has suffered because of it. (Excuse my length here, I  
suspect that several others do not conceive how this might work.)  
Because we speak biblical Hebrew when teaching biblical Hebrew we  
(myself and other teachers) bump into and learn surprising details  
every summer. (NB: we do not claim to be mother-tongue speakers but  
2nd language users can be good teachers, too. We have fun and  
students learn more.)


 >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.>

Well, the Greek corpus is millions of words. This should get us  
beyond the 0 versus 52  situation in BH.
Please let me know when you find AURION + aorist indicative.
Maybe someone with TLG will let us know within a few hours.
What do you think will be found? Isn't this kind of fun?

And like I said, should *AURION HLQON be found, that context will be  
a "humdinger" (B Dylan, "I shall Be Free", Freewheeling).  Until  
then, and I have every expectation of afterwards, I will keep my  
asterisk on it.

ERRWSO
Randall Buth





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