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NASB | Psalm 83:18 That they may know that You alone, whose name is the LORD, Are the Most High over all the earth. |
AMPLIFIED 2015 | Psalm 83:18 That they may know that You alone, whose name is the LORD, Are the Most High over all the earth. |
Subject: WHERE TO FIND ALL THE NAMES OF GOD |
Bible Note: Hi Tim, You wrote: Two quick points before I translate John 8:58. 1) What do you mean when you say that Greek is aspectual? I am not familiar with that term. Fact is, there are many linguists that deal in the finer nuances of the verbal systems of the biblical languages. Modern linguistic principles dictate considerable improvement in appreciating the original ideas of the Biblical Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek. I appreciate the logic, sound reasoning and considerable Bibliography, of author and university lecturer Rolf Furuli of no less than 25 years. He explains that the basic difference between the verbal systems is that in Greek, “aspect” is grammaticalized and this is also true in Hebrew, but not in English. Now, grammaticalization means that a particular grammatical characteristic is connected with the verb form and is not dependent upon the context. He goes on to say, “Most linguistic works on English say that English has aspects, but this is because aspect is used in a sense different from how it is used in this study (See J. Hewson and V. Bubenik, Tense and Aspect in Indo-European Languages, see also Current Issues in Linguistic Theory (Amsterdam: J. Benamins, 1997). P. 145) If “aspects” are defined as “viewpoints,” the perfective one being a focus encompassing both the beginning and the end of an event or state, and the imperfective one being a focus on a small sequence after the beginning and before the end, then English is capable of expressing aspects. But there is no English form, the purpose of which is exclusively to express aspect. Both in Hebrew and Greek, the fundamental parts of the verbal system are exclusively aspectual and their area of use are much broader than that of simple past and past continuous, which in English are used to express viewpoint. So, while both English and Hebrew/Greek are capable of expressing durative and punctual viewpoints, their fundamental role in the verbal system and their completely different areas of use, make Hebrew and Greek aspects qualitatively different from what is called “aspect” in English. 2) Why would I have to be completely time indifferent, since Greek is not time indifferent? It has past, present, perfect, and future tenses. Again, only in an in depth study of the “Excursus on Hebrew and Greek Verbs” is this made apparent to Greek and Hebrew language studies. The concept of “tense” is defined as “the grammaticalization of location in time.” (See B. Comrie, Tense; Cambridge University Press, 1985, p. 7) This means that whether the time of the verbal action is past, present or future, related to speech time or to some other time, it is seen by the verb form itself and not by the context alone. Thus, the words “went” and “taught”, in English, are past tense. Given Comrie’s definition of “tense,” neither Hebrew nor Greek have tenses, save possibly Greek future, which is viewed by most researchers as a tense. (See S. Porter, Verbal Aspect in the Greek of the New Testament, with Reference to Tense and Mood 1993, pp. 76-83. Porter denies that tense is grammaticalized at all in New Testament Greek.) The word “tense,” for Hebrew perfect and imperfect, or Greek present, aorist or imperfect really is a misnomer, though it still is used in most studies on the Greek verb and in some studies on the Hebrew verb. All the three recent dissertations on the Greek verb (Porter, Fanning and Olsen--A Semantic and Pragmatic Model of Lexical and Grammatical Aspect- differentiate between tense and time in a fine way. D. B. Wallace has a very fine discussion of this subject in his Greek Grammar Beyond the Basics: An Exegetical Syntax of the New Testament -- Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1996, pp. 504-510. The valuable Hebrew syntax written by Waltke and O’Connor -- An Introduction to Biblical Hebrew Syntax by Eisenbrauns, 1990 also distinguishes between time and tense. However, the recent comparative grammar of the Semitic languages written by E. Lipinski, Analecta 80; Leuven: Uitgiveij Peeters en Departement Oosterse Studies, 1997, while generally having a high quality, takes for granted that verbs in Hebrew having past meaning also have past tense. It is methodologically unsound to draw such a conclusion, since the past time can be a function of the context (thus being pragmatic) just as well as being a function of the verb (thus being semantic). Therefore, serious Hebrew and Greek linguists avoid using the “tense” but instead “conjugations” and speak of Greek present and Greek imperfect without adding the word “tense.” This is all well discussed and illustrated by Furuli. Truthfinder |