21st Century Biblical Hebrew -- pausal forms

I posted this text on another thread and now I have an update.

And now that problem about trop. There’s an old concept called “pausal forms”.

Trop generally consist of disjunctive and conjunctive forms. The disjunctive ones divide verses. Etnach is one of them; so is sof pasuk, the trop at the end of a verse.

The conjunctive trop, conversely, mark sets of words that are included together as a subunit of a verse. Conjunctive trop, for example, are used with the words or phrases emphasized by et when it takes the vowel tseire.

The pausal forms concept says that disjunctive trop are associated with anomalous word forms. That is, the anomalous word forms in Torah appear where there are disjunctive trop.

Modern computerized tabulation shows this isn’t so. The so-called anomalous forms appear sometimes with conjunctive trop. It’s also true that not all occurrences of disjunctive trop are assigned to anomalous forms.

Now that you know more about Biblical Hebrew, you should be asking what words are called anomalous in Torah?

For example, Gesenius once categorized the word maen in Exodus 7:27 as a piel present tense that for some reason had been written without the usual prefix of mem. Surely that ought to qualify as an anomaly. But it’s an aspectless verb, used to avoid the nuances of the various aspects.

Likewise, since Gesenius said that the Jews didn’t know why they put nun sofit on the ends of some verbs, those ought to be anomalies. You know that they are uncertainty epistemics.

I’ve been going through Torah word by word for years now, digging into new concepts. I’ve kept track of words that really seemed to be anomalous. Out of about 80,000 words in Torah, I’ve come up with maybe 200 that are anomalous – not just “hapax legomena”, like mesheq used of Avraham’s servant, but grammatically different and impossible to analyze into any of the binyanim or other forms we use now, and with no clear pattern of use.

Now, it’s entirely possible that Torah has some words that are scribal errors, that the Masoretic scholars didn’t pick up on and include in their notes, but I doubt it.

Given that the ancestors of the Jews started developing Hebrew by 2000 BCE, it’s more than likely that they had ways of saying things that were perfectly meaningful to them, not at all anomalous in the context of a millennium and a half of vernacular – but which turned up only once in the written record. It’s analogous to Axel Olrik’s recognition that in the history of any ethnic group, their narrators might have told any number of stories over their fires in caves and tents and huts – but a relatively small number survived the centuries to be put into writing.  

With the apparent anomalies in Biblical Hebrew, we might be looking at something as rare in the spoken language as pual is in Torah, but with just as distinctive a function – and we can’t tell what that function is because we only have one example.

Now I have a new bottom line. In Arabic there are pausal forms (the technical term is waqf), and they modify normal grammar at a pause like a break in thought (where English would have a comma for example) or the end of a sentence. Pausal forms are changes to nouns that are declined. 

That fact should have been a warning sign to anybody who was trying to apply Arabic grammar to Biblical Hebrew. Biblical Hebrew does not decline nouns. It can change them into adjectives with the suffix -i, but however much that might remind scholars of the Arabic jarr case with its kasrah, it is not the same. 

For one thing, there are no suffixes for other uses of nouns, no final fatha such as Arabic uses for the nasb form. 

For another thing, Hebrew does not have nunation such as Arabic uses for indefinite nouns; there is nothing to delete to produce a pausal form. What might have looked like nunation in Hebrew to past grammarians, was in verbs and it is a marker of the uncertainty epistemic. Past grammarians didn't know from epistemics, but it takes a terrible state of confusion to think that a situation applying to Arabic nouns also applies to Biblical Hebrew verbs. But we saw terrible states of confusion on the Greek thread, now didn't we?

And considering how confused scholars were about Classical Greek, I have to say that waqf is not discussed in a two-volume text on Quranic Arabic that I found online. All my Westernized texts discuss it: Wright, Price, the FLAMRIC course. If you were taught Arabic in an Arabic-speaking nation by somebody who grew up using the language, ask them what the difference is: is waqf a post-Quranic development?

Anyway, if you're taking a class in Biblical Hebrew and your professor starts babbling about pausal forms, pull up this post on your phone and share it with them with a note "don't test us on something that doesn't exist." Which sadly enough has been happening in Biblical Hebrew and Classical Greek for centuries now.