Re: Hebrew waw consecutive

J R wrote:
> Veolar, I'm not sure what the alternative is to "believing in"
> waw-conversive. If you want to say it always means 'and', and the suffix
> conjugation is always past/perfect, and the prefix conjugation always
> non-past/imperfect, then tense/aspect would be switching all over the place
> and nothing would make much sense (and the Bible is hard enough to
> understand already...).
Yes. But if they are purely aspectual and not tenses, is it still confusing?
I thought it was a common view that Biblical Hebrew distinguished perfective
and imperfective (or something similar) and that they changed in later Hebrew
to past and non-past or future, even if they often are translated as past vs.
non-past as default for convenience.


> I'm not an expert on this, but I thought it was accepted by everyone.
> Have you heard of arguments against it?
No, not really*. But I haven't really heard arguments for it either. I have
seen _A New Approach to the Problem of the Hebrew Tenses and Its Solution
Without Recourse to Waw-consecutive_ by Oswald Leonard Barnes quoted, but I
haven't read the book myself and can't find it online. When I'm searching on
the topic online most hits seems to only speculate about the diachronical
origin to it, and many hits are on JSTOR which I can't access.

But I'm wondering: Is there any book dealing with the reason to why the
theory were postulated and why [in the author and reviewers eyes] rightfully
so, to put on my books-to-buy list?



* Except that the theory was intended to solve the problems with switching
tenses, which is more easily solved with an aspectual view, which in turn
makes the waw-consecutive theory an unnecessary complication.

--
Veoler

Reply